Colorado Voices
The science behind CSU’s corpse flower
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CSU's corpse flower bloom offered researchers first-hand access to the rare, endangered flower
Colorado State University’s “Cosmo”, the corpse flower, bloomed for the first time to thousands of spectators marveling at the corm and spadix of it all.
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Colorado Voices is a local public television program presented by RMPBS
Colorado Voices
The science behind CSU’s corpse flower
Clip | 3m 50sVideo has Closed Captions
Colorado State University’s “Cosmo”, the corpse flower, bloomed for the first time to thousands of spectators marveling at the corm and spadix of it all.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipThis plants not behaving like any plant I've ever worked with.
It was growing, at one point, 10 inches a day.
And hat was not our educated guess, that was not the gambling that people were doing in the back.
In the plant world.
what happened last night usually takes three to four days.
It happened in six hours.
So, it is going against every plant rule that we all know.
This is “Amorphophallus Titanum.” Also known as the “Corpse Flower.” He is about eight years old.
I got him from a seedling eight years ago at a conference as a plant swap.
So a couple people have said it's the best schwag from a conference you'd ever get.
Which in hindsight, yeah, it is.
If you're smelling it right now, you kind of know why it's called the corpse flower.
In my opinion, it doesn't smell like a dead body.
But for the record, I haven't smelled a dead body before.
But it does smell cheesy, fungus-y, death-y.
Looking at it right now, it's probably three feet across, roughly.
It is the largest inflorescence in the world.
The largest flower From the base of the pot, up probably about five feet.
This is on the smaller side.
Most of them are probably six, seven, eight feet.
This is the spadix.
So, it's hollow and it feels like cork.
This is the petal, if you will.
And it feels similar to wilting lettuce right now.
And then that down there is where the male and female flowers are.
And the smell is coming from down there.
The “Titanums” all come from Indonesia, Sumatra, Indonesia.
They are endangered.
So there's about a thousand roughly left in the native lands, mainly due to deforestation and palm oil production.
These plants are male and female flowers inside, but they're incompatible.
So in order to produce seed off of him, we would need pollen from another plant.
They are mainly pollinated by carrion beetles and flesh flies.
So, this plant is intentionally So, this plant is intentionally trying to look like a dead animal.
It is a perfect case of mimicry.
And then it also smells so bad that all the carrion beetles and the flesh flies are like, “Yay, its a dead animal!
Let's go after it.” Birds and rhinos are also the two main seed distributors.
Rhino.
Yep.
We have different types of equipment going on here collecting all the VOCs, all of the volatile organic compounds, picking up all the smells.
It has probably 10 or 12 different compounds of smells.
One is, I think, cadaverine.
The other one is putrescine.
We're testing for the compounds that are being emitted from the corpse plant to try to get some explanation of the smell.
These are little pumps.
So we're going to pull the air through.
And then these tubes have a packing material inside them that is very sticky.
It's kind of like kitty litter.
So compounds stick really well to the kitty litter And then we can run it on an instrument in the chemistry department to get actual identifications.
It'll take six, seven, eight years for it to bloom the first time.
The next time it blooms, it will most likely happen more frequently.
On average, they will re-bloom every two to three years.
They're really hard to propagate.
Seed success is only like 50%.
So it's conservation efforts in botanical gardens, conservation conservatories like this that really help maintain that collection.
So just go to your local botanical garden in your conservatory and really help them understand it more.
Help them contribute, help them share the information.
And maybe that's how we can slow decline down.
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Colorado Voices is a local public television program presented by RMPBS