Posted on 11/16/2014 10:44:09 AM PST by beaversmom
In the fall of 2002, a seed was planted in the conservatory greenhouse on Tower Road. Over 10 years the seed grew up into a plant that had leaves, but no flowers to speak of. In the spring of 2012, Prof. Melissa Luckow, plant biology, got a phone call.
“You don’t really have any warning until it actually happens,” Luckow said.
Courtesy of Craig Cramer: Ready to go
This photo of Cornell’s titan arum plant was taken last week.
Next week, the plant is expected to open up, revealing its flowers.
The plant, known as titan arum, was finally going to bloom, a rare event that most people do not get a chance to see up close. Despite the timing of the bloom — over Spring Break — close to 10,000 people lined up outside the Kenneth Post Laboratory Greenhouse over the two-day-long bloom, according to Craig Cramer, a communications specialist with the School of Integrative Plant Science.
Last week it became apparent that Cornell’s “Wee Stinky,” as the plant is called, is going to bloom again next week.
“We were very surprised,” Luckow said. “We didn’t think ours would bloom again so soon.”
Titan arum is a tropical plant native to the rainforests of Sumatra that is known among botanists for having the largest unbranched inflorescence, or cluster of flowers, of any plant in the world. The plant is generally expected to bloom about seven to 10 years after it is first planted and about every four years after that, according to Luckow, but the timing of blooms can be extremely irregular and hard to predict.
Courtesy of Ed Cobb: Wee baby stinky
When titan arum is a young plant and when it is not blooming,
it will only have a stem and leaves.
Specimens of titan arum have been known to take close to 30 years to bloom in a greenhouse, but in recent decades the rate of titan arum blooms in greenhouse environments has increased.
“I think we’ve learned a lot more about cultivating these things now, and so getting them to bloom happens a lot more than it used to,” Luckow said.
The foliage of titan arum will die back during Sumatra’s dry season every year, leaving a potato-like tuber in the ground that will regrow leaves or an inflorescence when the dry season ends, according to Luckow. Much like the inflorescence, the tuber can also grow quite large. The largest titan arum tuber ever measured was about 200 pounds.
Plant biologists can tell that titan arum is going to bloom when instead of growing some leaves and a stem, a closed inflorescence emerges from the soil, Luckow said.
Besides its massive cluster of flowers, the plant is also known for smelling like rotting meat.
“Right when it was starting to bloom, and I believe this was around 9 or 10 p.m. … you could definitely smell it from the entrance of Ken Post,” said Monica Carvalho grad, a graduate student in plant biology.
Titan arum is one of many species of plants around the world that smells like rotting meat, according to Luckow. The purpose of the smell is to attract potential pollinators such as carrion flies, who will fertilize the plant’s female flowers with pollen carried from other titan arum plants.
Researchers from the lab of Prof. Robert Raguso, neurobiology and behavior, studied the chemicals that make up Wee Stinky’s stink in 2012 and plan to measure the plant’s scent again.
“We were very interested in looking into the specific organic compounds that are released and that are associated with that smell,” Carvalho said.
In 2012, researchers measured how the chemicals that make up the smell change over the course of the bloom, as the female flowers bloom first and the male flowers bloom afterwards. They also pointed a thermal camera at the plant to measure the heat released by Wee Stinky throughout the bloom.
According to Carvalho, the plant reached close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in 2012, a reaction that is hypothesized to help the plant’s scent disperse to attract more pollinators.
This time around, researchers will again be collecting chemical data on the scent to compare the differences between the scents associated with male and female flowers more closely, and again plan to measure the timing of heat output by the plant. According to Carvalho, the plant generates heat by metabolizing sugars that it stores in the main stalk of the inflorescence.
“This whole body is storing sugars, so when it starts generating the heat it’s actually burning a lot of the sugars that are stored. A lot of those sugars also go into feeding the developing embryos,” she said.
While the Raguso lab’s experiments will tell us much more about titan arum, Luckow said many of the ecological characteristics of this plant cannot be studied in a greenhouse. For example, the exact species of insects that pollinate titan arum are currently unknown. In order to find out which species are actually responsible for transporting pollen between titan arum plants, one would have to study the plants in their natural habitat — the rainforests of Sumatra.
“There really haven’t been serious pollination studies done,” Luckow said. “So we have an idea of what’s visiting it but we don’t know who’s actually pollinating it.”
Studying titan arum in the wild is difficult because the plant blooms so rarely and because it tends to grow on the edges of rainforests, a habitat that does not exist for very long, “so they tend to come and go,” Luckow said.
For now the species will be studied as best as can be done in greenhouses. Universities and botanical gardens that have a titan arum plant will freeze the pollen their plants release and trade it with each other, as the plant cannot self-pollinate.
“We froze pollen and passed it on, and I’m sure someone else has frozen pollen that we can get for ours,” Luckow said. “It’s only one day that the stigmas are receptive. If you miss that day, then that’s it, no fruits.”
Fruits will form a few weeks after the plant blooms and contain seeds that may be used to cultivate more titan arum plants.
As in 2012, the Kenneth Post Laboratory greenhouse will be open to the public this year and anyone can go in to pay Wee Stinky a visit and experience the stench for themselves.
Courtesy of Ed Cobb: Photo op
Monica Carvalho grad photographs Wee Stinky in 2012.
“It gets people here at Cornell, and it lets them see how remarkable nature is,” Luckow said. “It lets them know that here’s something that is threatened in the wild, and yet it’s just a remarkable thing.”
Carvalho also said that letting the public see Wee Stinky is an important thing to do.
“I think it’s a really important thing, also because the general public needs to appreciate biodiversity,” she said. “This is a plant that is endemic to Sumatra, really really far away. The chances of people actually seeing this plant in its natural habitat are really sparse, because I don’t think that’s much of a tourist destination.”
Luckow said Wee Stinky provides a good opportunity for plant biologists to show the public what they do and why it is interesting.
“I think we should be doing it with all science. It would be really nice if we could just let the public come and wander into our labs and talk to us and find out what we’re actually doing,” she said. “If you have a great big plant like this, it’s just cool. So people will come and see it.”
To stay up to date on the exact timing of the bloom of Wee Stinky, follow @CornellCALS on Twitter or like CornellCALS on Facebook.
high above Cayuga's waters there's an awful smell...
Reminds me of the man eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors.
FEED ME!
That’s got to be prehistoric!
anyone know how much was the Government grant this dingbat received?
Obamacare in full bloom.
100%
That would be 'Big Stinky'.
Will the sports-casting Cornell ag school grad be there?
Who is that? Olbermann?
Heck, Olbermann doesn't drive, so I can't see him driving a combine, tractor, etc.
About the only thing he drives is a virtual manure spreader (to update a line from an old joke).
Yes, I remember some of that between him and Coulter.
Wee Stinky. I thought the article was about my dog.
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