It stinks, but everyone wants to see it! Sydney's "corpse arum" blooms for the first time in 15 years

On the 23rd local time, the giant konjac ( Amorphophallus titanum ) in the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney opened. This is the first time in 15 years that the "corpse flower" has bloomed in the garden. Not only did it attract long queues of locals just to see its beauty and smell its stench; through a 24-hour live broadcast on the Internet, this konjac named Putricia has become a global Internet celebrity.

Giant konjac blooms｜Red Star News

What does the giant konjac smell like when it blooms? People are not actually admiring its flowers, but what is it about the konjac?

Note: Some of the information in this article is compiled from the article "Giant Arum, Why is it So Rare?" by Ziyu.

He's so big.

Regarding the meaning of the specific epithet of the giant arum, "titanum" comes from Titan, which means "huge". The genus name should be a description of the shape of the tuber of the genus Amorpho. "Amorpho" comes from the ancient Greek "amorphos", which means amorphous; the root of "phallus" in Greek means "swelling, swelling", and in the modern context it is usually a synonym for the X stem...

A giant tuber of giant konjac cultivated in the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. The tuber of giant konjac is used to store nutrients underground, with a diameter of up to 65 cm and a maximum weight of more than 100 kg.

Not only are the tubers of the giant arum astonishingly large, but the leaves are also huge. All plants of the genus Arum have only one leaf growing on the tuber: a compound leaf with many forks. For the giant arum, this leaf looks like a small tree. The petiole is usually 3-4 meters high, the leaf diameter is more than 5 meters, and the coverage area is more than 20 square meters.

A giant arum that Purple Sandpiper had taken care of at the University of Washington: The "trunk" of the two-story-high "tree" in the middle is actually the petiole of the giant arum, and the "crown" above is a huge lobe of a compound leaf. This makes the Araucaria on the right, as a real tree, feel embarrassed...丨Purple Sandpiper

Huge short-lived inflorescence

However, what makes the giant arum famous is that it has the largest inflorescence in the world. When the inflorescence opens, the inner side of the spathe and the spadix are crimson, making the entire 1-meter-high inflorescence look like an animal body with a huge wound, emitting a pungent corpse odor, and can maintain a "corpse residual temperature" of about 36 degrees Celsius. For Sarcophagidae and Silphidae, who love rotten meat but do not have enough brain cells to distinguish the authenticity of rotten meat, this is an irresistible temptation. Therefore, driven by their own desires, they become pollinators of the giant arum flower.

Why do we say inflorescence instead of flower? Because the single flower of giant arum is very small, and this giant plant is composed of inflorescences composed of hundreds of small flowers and spathes.

Giant丨Yu Tianyi

This was taken with the help of the staff of Beizhi. The so-called "dream version" of giant konjac (actually, all the lights in the greenhouse were turned off and then a flashlight was used to illuminate it)丨Yu Tianyi

To facilitate the following explanation, let’s take a look at a diagram:

Note: This is the third giant arum to bloom. The two flowers next to it have withered. The staff cut off the spathe and appendages to allow the seeds to grow better, so we are seeing a perspective view of the inside of the spathe.

Spadix refers to the entire inflorescence of the "spike" plus the spathe. Plants in the Araceae family generally have spadix. Spathe refers to the bract that wraps the "spike". This specialized bract replaces the petals and plays the role of attracting pollinating insects to the flower. The upper part of the spadix is ​​a large and eye-catching appendix . At the base of the "spike", the true flowers are specialized into male flowers (upper) and female flowers (lower). The tepals (petals + sepals = tepals) and pistils (carpels) of the male flower degenerate, leaving only stamens ; at the same time, the stamens and tepals of the female flower degenerate, leaving only pistils (carpels). In the most primitive group of the Araceae family, the flowers on the inflorescence are all bisexual, and there is no distinction between the upper and lower. The specialized bisexual flowers can better avoid self-pollinating.

Here is a breakdown of the parts:

External spathe

The inside of the spathe is not smooth

This is a photo taken by a staff member of Beizhi. The anemone-like organ in the photo is the pistil of the female flower, and the shiny little ball is its stigma. The fluorescent texture of the stigma shows that it is still alive and can accept pollen. The large obstruction above is the appendage. The appendage does not play the role of passing on the family line. In this photo, the male flower is blocked by the appendage.

This photo of the appendage was also taken with the organ inserted inside, and you can clearly see the densely packed small papillae on the appendage.

The "corpse flower" that emits the stench of corpses

Another major feature of the giant konjac is its terrible smell. When the giant konjac triplets bloomed in the Beijing Botanical Garden, I went to see them on the second day after the first flower bloomed. Although the smell was not as severe as on the first day, it still caused nasal allergies. I felt that the inside of my nasal cavity was swollen and it didn't go away all night, just like choking on water or catching a cold.

Wikipedia describes its smell in an extremely euphemistic way: 'which is reminiscent of the smell of a decomposing mammal' . I can't complain! It's clearly the smell of dead stinky fish + toilet ! Anyway, it's unforgettable. But there's no need to feel sorry if you haven't smelled it. Don't think that this is some kind of "corpse konjac" that emits a strong and bad corpse smell. It's not that bad, otherwise I wouldn't have gone there one day and smelled it all night, and then went there again a few days later...

This is where the effect of the extremely long appendage comes into play. The temperature at the top of the appendage can be several degrees higher than the room temperature, causing low pressure to form around the top of the appendage "pillar", forcing the odor produced at the base of the spathe to be transported to the outside through convection, allowing the odor to spread further.

When the first flower bloomed, the staff of Beizhi opened a small window on the spathe to collect the smell for research. At this time, the spathe of the third flower next to it had not even appeared yet.

Take a closer look at the interior and this is what it looks like.

Then let's briefly talk about the pollination mechanism of flowers. When the giant arum blooms in the evening of the first day, it will open its female flowers first (actually, it will open its stigma), while the male flowers will not open at this time (that is, the anthers will not crack, which the staff calls "breaking the wall"). On the second day, the activity of the female flowers decreases, and the male flowers begin to prepare to break the wall. Within a few hours after the second flowering (also in the evening), the male flowers will fully mature and "break the wall" to provide fresh pollen. Insects will bring the pollen to another flower.

First flowers. Female flowers that have been open all day and male flowers that are about to open.

When the third flower blooms, the staff collects fresh pollen. One anther is as big as a mung bean. After collecting, it is stored at a low temperature of 15 degrees before processing.

The bottom part of the giant arum is a bulb, so it can reproduce asexually.

The giant arum was first discovered by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari in Sumatra in 1878.

The first time cultivated giant arums bloomed was at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, also known as the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

The current record for the tallest inflorescence of the giant arum was set by the University of Bonn in Germany in 2003.

This plant is actually very difficult to grow. It is said that the giant arum introduced to Wuhan died for unknown reasons...The triplets in the Beijing Botanical Garden are flowers that bloomed from bulbs that are more than ten years old. The last time a giant arum bloomed in the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden was in 2010. It happened fifteen years later, so it caused an even greater sensation in the local area.

Amorphophallus family

There are still some things I want to say about the genus Arum. There are 200 species of Arum in the Araceae family (written as "Arum" in Flora of China and FOC), with Southeast Asia as the modern differentiation center, widely distributed in the Eastern Hemisphere, Africa and northern Australia. There are 16 species in my country, 7 of which are endemic. Most species of Arum have flowers and leaves that do not meet, with leaves growing but no flowers, and flowers without leaves.

What is interesting about the genus Amorphophallus is their extremely robust appendages, which are particularly prominent in the Amorphophallus paeoniifolius .

The most commonly cultivated species of this genus is Amorphophallus konjac , which is the raw material of konjac jelly and konjac jelly that we usually eat. What we eat is not its most eye-catching inflorescence, but the spherical tuber buried deep below. Its spherical tuber is rich in polysaccharides, high in cellulose and low in calories, so it has been very popular in recent years.

Wild konjac is only distributed in Yunnan, and the konjac in other areas are all escapees from cultivation.

The leaf of the Amorphophallus konjac. Note that this is a whole leaf.

Like the giant konjac, the inflorescence of the flower konjac is equally strange and enchanting. Such an inflorescence suddenly rises from the ground without any warning. Because there are no leaves to complement it, the inflorescence appears even more bizarre, so the flower konjac was also called "demon taro" in ancient times.

A closer look at its interior reveals that the structure is almost identical to that of the giant arum. The appendages are aurora red, with closely arranged male flowers underneath.

A closer look reveals that the male flowers have "broken the wall" and pollen is spreading from the anthers of the male flowers.

Also, I took this photo while holding my breath and enduring the extremely strong stench. If you get close to smell the odor of the flower konjac, it is no less stinky than that of the giant konjac. If you smell it too much, you will feel that everything smells like konjac.

I recommend you to look at the photos of several other types of konjac: Amorphophallus paeoniifolius , Amorphophallus dunnii , Amorphophallus henryi (which is simply a smaller version of the giant konjac), Amorphophallus tonkinensis (a rare and cute species in the genus Amorphophallus), and Amorphophallus richardsiae from South Africa (also a heavy-tasting wonder).

Author: Yu Tianyi

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)

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