Smaller Corpse Flower Relative Discovered, Smells Like Roadkill and Feces
Posted on February 7, 2012
A new, smaller relative of Amorphophallus is about one quarter the size of the "corpse flower" plant (Amorphophallus titanum), but it is just as stinky. The 4.5-foot-tall plant, Amorphophallus perrieri, started reeking this week as it bloomed in a University of Utah campus greenhouse. The word Amorphophallus stands for "misshapen penis" because of the shape of the plants flower-covered shaft, called the inflorescence or the spadix.
The plant has been submitted to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris as part of the process of designating the plant a new species. The naming of the plant won't be official until about a year from now after Greg Wahlert, a postdoctoral researcher in biology, publishes a scientific paper formally describing the species. Wahlert is pictured with the plant in the photograph above.
University of Utah biology Professor Lynn Bohs says the plant smells like roadkill. Bohs says, "I smelled rotting roadkill out in the sun reeking. 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."
The horrible smelling plant nearly made some people that smelled it vomit. Bohs says, "They are just so rude - their appearance and smell. Everybody I've talked to says they almost started puking when they smelled it. It's horrid."
Wahlert collected the new species from Nosy Mitsio and Nosy Ankarea - two islands northwest of Madagascar. After Wahlert first collected specimens of the new plant in 2006 and 2007 and discovered it was a new species, he found the Paris museum's herbarium held a dried specimen collected from one of the same islands by French botanist-geologist Joseph Marie Henri Perrier de la Bathie (1873-1958), who didn't realize it was a new species. So Wahlert is naming it for Perrier.