FOUL SMELLING CORPSE FLOWER

FOUL SMELLING CORPSE FLOWER

Subject: Environment

Context : Recently, over a thousand people queued up outside an abandoned gas station in San Francisco’s Bay Area to catch a glimpse of the extremely rare and aptly named ‘corpse flower’.

Concept :

Corpse Flower

• It is known for its putrid smell, which is often compared to that of rotting flesh.
• It is a flowering plant, which is native to the rainforests of Sumatra in Indonesia.
• The scientific name of the rare plant, Amorphophallustitanum, quite literally translates to giant, misshapen phallus
• The plant is native to Indonesia but its saplings have been cultivated in zoos, botanical gardens and greenhouses around the world over the years.
• In about a decade, the ‘corpse flower’ can grow to be up to 10 feet tall and unveil two of its key components:

A deep red skirt-like petal known as the spathe and

A yellow rod-like ‘spadix’

• The crucial component of the plant is the ‘corm’, a fleshy underground plant stem which acts as a storage organ where the corpse plant’s energy is stored.
• The corpse flower is known to be one of the world’s largest ‘unbranched inflorescence’ or a stalk bearing a cluster of flowers.
• The plant emits the distinct smell only when it is in bloom, which happens once every 10 years or so and only for a brief period of time.

Why is corpse flower so rare?

• The plant population appears to be dwindling in its native land of Sumatra due to deforestation for crops and lumber.
• It was listed as an endangered plant in 2018 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
• It is not easy to preserve the corpse flower outside its natural habitat.
• It requires a very specific level of heat and humidity to thrive.
• The lack of genetic variety leads to inbreeding, which means closely related plants are bred with one another.
• The seeds of the plant, known as recalcitrant seeds, are not easy to store either.