Plants are largely smart in ways that many people may not understand or appreciate. They should be, because most of them move a little (if any), so they need a complex chemistry to communicate and protect themselves, and often decorate themselves in strange clothes. Some plants actually simulate animals, such as South Africa Beetle DaisiFor example, which has evolved petals imitating the dark flies that rest on FlowersThus deceiving errors in “mating” with them.
The smell of many “good” plants – for humans – but some go several steps in the other direction, and give themselves to the world as dead animal diseases. Instead of bright and attractive flowers that bring bees, they have dark, stinky dark flowers. Like, really bad. This category of “” “Carion flowers“It includes many species, but a few of them are attractive Rafflesia ArnoldiiAlso known as “Stink Corpse Lily”, which also holds the record as the world’s largest flower. According to her name, he wanders in the body in festivals, which is approximately the size and appearance of the explosive frame made of codified beef. It is also Parasite Because whoever needs to be alive when you are great?
R. Arnondi Its generals are competed only by Titan Arum, which bears an incredible Latino name Amorphophalus TitanumAlmost translated into the “Misshapen PHALUS” giant. In fact, it seems that something like a male dog in the heat, but it is the size and shape of the satellite dish in the old school, and sometimes reaches nine feet. The real Titan with the largest flowering on the floor, it radiates a intoxicated fragrance described as a mixture of dead fish, rotten cabbage and garlic.
This rare and extinct plant is settler on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, but it is the crown jewel for many plant centers all over the world. Its rotten smell is actually a point of sale for curious visitors, but it only blooms for a few days every two or three years. When this sample looks ready, it rotates Blum hours People line up around the mass to get a whiff.
“Some attendees are unable to withstand the bad smell, use and cover their noses while they are approaching the flower.”
How and why the plants evolved to feed very badly, it was something of mystery, but recent research revealed some of their secrets and indicates that such plants are not just anomalous cases but important organs in their environmental system. Vijayasancar Raman, a plant scientist in the service of inspection of animal and plant health in the US Department of Agriculture, was lucky (his words) to study A. Titanum In the Mississippi University Medical Park, which appeared about 21 (!) Of these malicious mammoths.
“It is completely uncommon for a vegetable garden to have many plants that grow actively at the same time,” Raman said to the email. “I used to imagine them as intelligent giants between their type. Plant gardens attract thousands of visitors of all ages, and they were keen to see unusual flowering that occurs once for a decade of time and the smell of a unique smell. It is possible that there are many children from local schools and universities with their first flower.
In a paper published in the magazine Biochemistry and the environment In February, Raman and his colleagues were able to determine 66 different volatile scents coming from the factory – many of them were first recorded. In the paper, they notice something that seems directly from the magician magazine: “It has been observed the strongest and most nauseous scent in the middle of the night, and attracted many flies, ants, mites and cockroaches.” They do not seem like living organisms that anyone wants to attract, but these errors help to meet the plant. Not everything should be roses.
Titan Arum (Amorphophalus Titanum) at Bloom at the United States Plant Park, November 20, 2005. (US Park Park)“In addition to the chemical tradition, Titan Arum has evolved to imitate rotting meat to the eyes of the insect pollinators through the presence of parts of the flowers in meat color”, the Raman report and its participants. “They are rewarding insects visiting the warmth by generating heat through the thermal generation, which also works as a flame to attract pollen during flowering and aid in the spread of flying materials far away in the forest. Thus, Titan Arum uses the visible, thermal and chemical sermon to exploit flies and other insects to pollinate.”
It is not surprising, that the inappropriate Titan Arum Cocktail includes many sulfur -containing compounds, which are often found the yellow symmetrical element near volcanoes that distinguish everything from rotten eggs to bad breathing. Few of the most prominent of these in A. Titanum It is Oligosulfides, such as Methael Second Sulfide and Methil Tircholved. You may not know the meaning of these chemical names, but you definitely faced them: they are chemicals in the decomposing meat that gives this package of forgotten meat in the back of your distinctive snow. It is formed when the bacteria are sulfuric acids that contain sulfur. Directly, the smell of brutal meat is created by countless small bacterial taxes.
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But Raman and his team found something more surprising in their analysis: the fragrant scents were also present.
“I was astonished by the large number of chemicals that were produced during flowering, each with different smell properties,” Raman explained. “What confuses me is that although the plant is known for the smell of bad smell, it also produces many sweet chemicals with a sweet smell.”
“It was not somewhat unexpected for me that the mechanism behind the smell of rotting flowers is very simple.”
Raman said, “He has two hypotheses for this:” These additional sweets may be the sweet smell as secondary ingredients in the recipe to create a distinctive main smell; Without it, achieving the specific smell that the pollina loves may be impossible. In a scenario without running beetles for vaccination, at some point in the evolutionary process, the factory can still use different groups of “regular pollinators” by switching and setting symbols position to enhance cute. A certain type of pollinatization and survival survival. “
Such plants are more common than you expect: this wonderful wonderful flower may live somewhere near you. Distical forests are filled in West Illinois, where I now live, with many plants that you expect: oak, blue, and honey. But the plants that look more than others – as if they belonged to some of the distant forests, and not the rural Middle West – are fetal flowers.
Last spring, the group of the original plants that you sometimes joined to search for them came out Cabbage ((SymplocarPus Foetidus), Which resembles an exotic egg maroon. Its cover -like structure is called a lab -shaped chicks called Spadix, which is a fat handle scattered through dozens of small petal yellow flowers. It is one of the first plants that appeared in the spring, penetrating the frozen ground using its unique ability to generate heat. Oh, as the name suggests, it can smell the output, although I personally could not discover a lot of smell when I got and inhaled my knees.
Cabbed (symplocarPus foetidus). (Farah)Recently, the Plant Association has gone on a field trip to the Mississippi Park’s Park, where we faced the Canadian wild ginger (Assarm Canadense), A type with a very modest and low flower on the ground that I never noticed it if not for the obsessed with plant science in my company. Its velvet leaves in the shape of a heart that protects one flower in the base, looks like a orchid of the swamps of Florida more than something you expect to be seen near the river between Iowa and Ilinoi. It also produces Sharp smellAlthough it is relatively light. For me, it was dirt, not unpleasant, but it is a dinner bell for flies and beetles, and some of the relevant species can smell a more permeable smell.
A study published this month in the magazine sciences Explore the accurate genetic mechanisms of Asarum Flowers to see how to withdraw this, and explore the methods in which some plants are produced in the sex of a dual -methayl sulfide, this compound destroyed by the corpse. The researchers wiped 53 species and found a group of genes in the most smell types, and in other scents as well. By expressing these genes in bacteria ColaThey installed the factory recipe, so to speak. Surprisingly, what they discovered was not a particularly complex process. “[J]Two or three changes of amino acids are needed to acquire the characteristics, “they advance, which helps to clarify” why the current tradition with the very prevailing collar flying as a form of floral imitation. “
“The Salon”, the biologist at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and the author of the study, to the Salon newspaper, said, “It was somewhat unexpected for me that the mechanism behind the smell of rotting flowers is very simple.”
“Cori Zahra’s chemistry tells us that it is just a smart adaptation and the development of the factory through the simple genetic key on what appears to take advantage of the largely unused section of the pollinators,” Raman explained. He said that the self -embarrassing genetics of this plant makes it “unique and interesting.” While many other plant species, “including many orchids and insect plants, which have been adapted and developed differently to be successful by making simple genetic and behavioral changes,” continued, “The corpse flower is one of the most advanced and intelligent plants there. The vital simulation has moved to the next, inaccural level.”
Explore these relationships not only the scent bomb science-it helps us to understand the reason for the development of many plants that may seem (for us) disgusting or reverse results. It can throw an important light on the ports that these plants fill in nature, giving us a better understanding of their decisive role within ecosystems. In fact, many of these strange plants are at risk of extinction, as is certain in a a report It was published last October by examining the threats facing the body’s flowers. He carries a height of seven hours in Kallinga, India, a group of researchers came 30 Rafflesia Banaoana The plants open near the river. Chris Thorouf, the plant scientist at Oxford Botanical University and the nursery park, brought tears.
To spend time with Nader Raflesia Thorf said: “It is the closest to magic.”
