Large totally strange flower

Crazy that these large crazy strange flowers from Borneo should come to attention twice in a week (here and here).  Is everybody but yours truly wandering around in SE Asian tropical forests?  No matter, it's TPP's job to call you attention to them, so that if one blooms in you yard, you'll recognize them. 

Totally strange flower

As a flower guy TPP is green with envy of anyone who has seen this beauty in the field, and that's funny because the plant is never ever is green itself.  This plant is a completely subterranean parasite that only surfaces to flower.  It superficially resembles a gigantic star flower (Stapelia) because it is fly pollinated.  But so hard to describe. You'll have to go see for yourselves. It's easier than going to Borneo, a place TPP has never been. TPP has wrote about one of its cousins before.

That's one very spooky plant!

TPP was thinking about trying to find a really spooky plant for a Halloween post, but it wasn't going well. Then a colleague hit upon a nomination that just can't be beat, so what the heck, here's the link to one truly spooky plant from the In Defense of Plants blog. You can see more of these bizarre flowers here. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - A Corpse

Friday finds my main PC suffering from some malware and while the geeks are busily putting things back in place, it makes access to my archives on a secure server difficult, so to post a fabulous flower required a bit of a punt and a visit to the Wikicommons. So here is Rafflesia arnoldii, sometimes called a corpse flower, but so are many other stinky flowers. All such flowers stink because they smell, and look, like carrion to attract fly and/or beetle pollinators who are deceived into thinking that this is a brood substrate for their offspring. Here's another from the recent FFF archives and notice how much the general pattern and coloration are alike although not closely related at all. Flies are flies, and such patterns trigger their behavior. This particular species has the biggest single bloom of all flowering plants, and because it is a subterranean parasitic plant, this is all you ever see, the blossom. If you find one of these in your yard, and at a meter in diameter it would be hard to miss, you live in Sumatra. The name is a double honorific, something a bit unusual. The genus is named for Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, as is the famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore, home of the Singapore Sling and one of the Phactor's favorite places before they renovated it and removed most of the old charm. The specific epithet (not a species name) is in honor of Dr. Joseph Arnold, a famous naturalist who actually died in Batavia, modern day Jakarta, back when it was a most unhealthy place due to malaria and other tropical diseases.

Identify this fungus

One of the Phactor's academic passtimes is plant identification. This skill takes a certain amount of knowledge, considerable experience, and the ability to not be misled, a common student mistake. Here's an example. A citizen wanders into the university, finds their way to my laboratory for plant identification, and asks the student on station, "Can you identify this fungus for me?" Now identification of fleshy fungi is another such skill, and at one time the Phactor was pretty good at the local fungal flora, but without lots of regular practice you lose your edge. Well, the student did one thing right, summoned me, and did one thing wrong, they were misled by the initial question and started looking in the wrong place. You see, fungi don't have flowers, and while lacking chlorophyll, this plant has flowers and actually all you usually see is just the flowering shoots of a subterranean parasitic plant. Locally this plant is called "Indian pipe" (Monotropa uniflora) and its a member of the heath/Rhododendron family, and while common enough, it is rather inconspicuous even in flower. So the lack of chlorophyll was taken to mean this was a fungus, but that isn't a valid dichotomy, and a very chagrined student hopefully learned a couple of lessons. Make your own observations and don't jump to someone else's erroneous conclusions.

Friday Fabulous Flower from Far Afield - Mistletoe

After thinking about parasitic plants all week, it only seemed natural to display one for as the FFF. Mostly you don't think about mistletoes as having very showy flowers, but that's because many of us are more familiar with mistletoes in the Viscaceae. In Australia mistletoes are members of the Loranthaceae, and they often have a striking display of colorful flowers that attract nectar feeding mistletoe birds and
honeyeaters, there being no hummingbirds. In the second image a large mistletoe is seen growing upon a gum tree (Eucalyptus). Sorry, the species of mistletoe is unknown to me, perhaps an Amyema.