- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
Don't tell me they found Tyrannosaurus rex meat again!2 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
-
Course Corrections4 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Largest flower?
Here's another news article about the blooming of the "world's largest flower", and every time this happens, they make the same mistake; the "corpse flower" isn't a flower. No question about it though, the titan aroid is an amazing plant, and seeing it in flower in person is very impressive. The flowering structure can be over 6 feet tall, but you'd be more impressed by the odor. TPP had a smaller species flower in his house a few years back. It's equivalent structure was about 3 feet tall and on a 2 foot stalk. It smelled like someone had dragged a cow carcass into out house, so Mrs. Phactor said, "OUT!". This type of aroid produces the odor of rotting flesh, a corpse. This is a giant jack-in-the-pulpit and consists of a cloaking leaf, a spathe, and a spike of lots of little flowers on it called a spadix, some male flowers and some female flowers, and maybe some sterile ones too. All you usually see is the apex of the spike sticking up unless you cut the spathe out of the way. The flowers are down at the bottom. When flying in toward the carrion, the pollinators, probably beetles, hit the spike and tumble into the funnel formed by the spathe. So sorry, it's not a flower anymore than a sunflower is a flower. Curiously the world's largest flower (Rafflesia) is also a carrion flower and it's plant is a complete parasite living under ground except for the flowers.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment