ared it to the other specimens and the plants that I had collected,” Wahlert says. “Perrier spent years working on scores of other plant groups [and describing hundreds of other new species] and just never got around to it.”
The corpse flower smells like rotting meat to attract the flies and beetles that pollinate it. Wahlert had expected the new species would smell like cheese, which it did briefly when it began blooming Feb. 3. But the odor soon grew worse – much worse – and more like its giant relative.
“I smelled rotting roadkill out in the sun reeking,” says University of Utah biology Professor Lynn Bohs, in whose lab Wahlert works. “There’s also a note of public restroom – a Porta Potty smell.”
Wahlert added: “I would say carrion and feces. When you get right up to it, it’s really foul and disgusting.”
Another Utah researcher collected volatile gases emitted by the plant “and will identify the components of the smell,” Wahlert says. Only a small group of Amorphophallus species have been tested for odors, but the known aromas range from rotting meat to anise, cheese, dung, fish, urine, spice and chocolate, he adds.
Two weeks before the plant began to bloom, “it was just a little bud sticking out of the dirt,” he says. When it bloomed, the stalk was almost 4 feet tall and the inflorescence or spadix was about 10 inches long. It was yellow, with pollen on the top part. The lower part, hidden by the reddish, leafy spathe, was covered by hundreds of tiny flowers, each a fraction of an inch wide. (Sometimes the entire spadix is referred to informally as the flower.)
“They are just so rude – their appearance and smell,” Bohs says. “Everybody I’ve talked to says they almost started puking when they smelled it. It’s horrid.”
In the Same Family as Philodendrons and Skunk Cabbage
Some thought the plants’ suggestive genus name was horrid. In 2008, Sir David Attenborough said he invented the name “titan arum” for the corpse flower for his BBC series “The Private Life of Plants” because he thought it would be inappropriate to repeatedly refer to Amorphophallus.
Bohs says the genus belongs to the family Araceae, commonly known as the arum or aroid family. The family includes philodendrons, taro root (from which Hawaiians make poi), skunk cabbage and anthurium, a plant common in floral arrangements, with a yellow spadix surrounded by a leafy, red, heart-shaped spathe.
Wahlert says plants in the genus Amorphophallus are found in southern Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Africa, including Madagascar. Of the 170 or so species in the genus, which first was discovered in 1834, “a lot have been known for 150 years, but one, two or three new species are described every year,” he adds.
A. titanum grows naturally only in Sumatra in Indonesia, although it is found around the world in greenhouses that compete for the largest corpse flower plant. The Guinness Book of Records title currently is held by a New Hampshire specimen that had a spadix measuring 10-feet-2.25-inches tall in 2010. Counting the stem and spadix, A. titanum can reach 20 feet tall, compared with a 5-foot maximum for A. perrieri, which has a longer stem and shorter spadix – about 10 inches long in the case of the one that bloomed on campus.
New Species Collected from a Burial Island
Wahlert collected the new species from Nosy Mitsio and Nosy Ankarea – two islands northwest of Madagascar, which is off the east coast of Africa. “Nosy” means island in the Malagasy language. The plant since has been found on Madagascar.
He had to obtain permission from a local village to visit Nosy Ankarea, an uninhabited, half-mile-wide island where the Sakalava people buried their rulers. Unlike Ankarea, which is still vegetated, Mitsio is heavily deforested. A. perrieri was found there in low scrub behind beach dunes.
“I went there in 2006 to collect tree violets, and when I got there I discovered these Amorphophallus in full bloom on the first day in the field,” cutting and collecting four or five specimens, Wahlert says. “That night I got malaria. I stayed there a week but was so sick