Stinky Corpse Flowers Face a Recordkeeping Problem at Botanic Gardens, and It’s Leading to Inbreeding, Study Finds
Inconsistent data may be hurting conservation efforts for these endangered plants, known for attracting visitors to their scent of rotting flesh
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Corpse flowers are the celebrities of the plant world. When these rare plants bloom in botanic gardens, thousands of fans flock to see them—and, perhaps more importantly, to smell them.
These large, flashy flowers—also known as titan arum—are famous for producing a pungent odor that stinks like rotting flesh. And since they bloom for just 24 to 48 hours, visitors must hurry in if they hope to catch a whiff.
But despite their popularity, corpse flowers (Amorphophallus titanum) are at risk of disappearing: Scientists estimate just about 162 individuals remain in the wild.
Botanic gardens around the world are leading the charge to save this iconic species. But, if they hope to succeed, they’ll need to improve their recordkeeping, according to a new study published this month in the journal Annals of Botany.
Data related to corpse flowers are “severely lacking” throughout the global botanical community, the researchers write in the paper. Records are inconsistent, unstandardized and decentralized.
Bad recordkeeping might not seem like a big deal. But researchers say it contributes to low genetic diversity and inbreeding among corpse flowers living at botanic gardens.
“We don’t think people are consciously making the choice to inbreed their plants,” says lead author Olivia Murrell, a plant biologist now at Manchester Metropolitan University who conducted the research while at Northwestern University, in a statement. “They just don’t know what they have, because the data are incomplete.”
Inbred corpse flowers might produce less pollen, or they may die right after they bloom, adding extra stress to an already struggling species. During their study, the researchers learned of one botanic garden that had all albino corpse flower offspring, potentially due to inbreeding. “They didn’t survive, because they didn’t have chlorophyll to photosynthesize,” Murrell adds in the statement.
When the entire corpse flower population loses genetic diversity, that can lead to real problems. “If a disease or pest affects plants that are all genetically similar, all plants in that population are more likely to suffer,” Murrell says.
“The population needs variation to survive,” she says. “If nothing changes, it could inbreed itself into extinction.”
“We’ve got work to do”
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For the study, researchers contacted botanic gardens and other institutions around the world that had corpse flowers in their collections. They asked each venue to share any and all records related to their current and past corpse flowers, whether the plants were living or dead.
In the end, they were able to piece together data from 111 institutions in North America, Asia, Australia and Europe. The researchers gathered information related to nearly 1,200 titan arum plants, including their origins and reproductive history. Some botanic gardens sent spreadsheets and lists, while others sent handwritten notes and prose.
Using this data, the team tracked how frequently plants were cloned, crossed and exchanged between institutions. They find that 24 percent of the corpse flowers in the study were clones, and another 27 percent were crosses between related individuals.
The majority of plant material exchanges—transfers of seeds, seedlings, whole plants and corms—took place between institutions located on the same continent. Just 24 of 579 documented transfers were intercontinental.
Researchers also took samples from 65 titan arum plants and sequenced their DNA. This experiment also found low genetic diversity and high inbreeding among corpse flowers in institutions, confirming the initial findings.
Together, these results suggest botanic gardens and other institutions around the globe must not only take steps to improve their records, but also continue to work together to conserve this iconic plant, says Stephen Jones, a horticulturist with the U.S. Botanic Garden who was not involved with the research.
“We’d prefer that this study found that we’ve got all these detailed records and incredibly diverse ex situ collection worldwide, but that’s not the case,” he tells Smithsonian magazine. “So, we’ve got work to do. That’s just fine, now we understand more about what that work is.”
A case study for other endangered plants
In the wild, titan arum live in the tropical rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, where they can grow up to 10 to 12 feet tall, according to the Chicago Botanic Garden.
They bloom infrequently and for a very short time, so corpse flowers have evolved some unique adaptations to help them reproduce. The most famous is the production of a strong aroma that attracts pollinators like flies and beetles. They also generate heat, which helps the stench travel farther, and they bloom at night, when pollinators tend to be most active.
Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari is credited with first discovering the corpse flower in 1878. He sent some of the plant’s seeds and tubers back to Europe, and titan arum has been spreading to botanic gardens, arboreta and research institutions around the world ever since.
Wild populations, meanwhile, have declined over the last 150 years because of habitat loss, climate change and invasive species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists titan arum as “endangered.”
Conserving corpse flowers in botanic gardens can be tricky. Unlike many other plants, their seeds will not germinate once they’ve been dried, so they can’t be stored in seed banks. Male and female plants also bloom at different times, meaning botanists often have to play an active role in their reproduction by facilitating pollination. And since female flowers are only viable for a few hours, the plants’ caretakers must scramble to use whatever pollen they have on hand, which might be from a closely related plant or even the same individual—resulting in inbreeding.
These problems are likely not unique to corpse flowers. Murrell is now conducting a similar study on tropical carnivorous pitcher plants that are housed at institutions like botanic gardens—and so far, the data is even more spotty and incomplete than for the corpse flowers, she tells Smithsonian magazine in an email.
“[Titan arum] was really an opportunity to assess how the world’s plant records are doing,” she says. “With the knowledge that we gained from the corpse flowers, we can extrapolate these methods to other endangered species in living collections.”
Titan arum also makes a good case study because of the public’s interest in it, according to Brett Summerell, chief scientist and director of science, education and conservation at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney in Australia.
Summerell, who was not involved with the research, tells Smithsonian magazine in an email that studying charismatic plants like the corpse flower can “highlight the importance of the conservation of all plants.”
“These iconic species … can become the ‘pandas’ of the plant world—highlighting the importance of plants to our own survival and the desperate need to protect them from the biodiversity extinction crisis currently underway all around the world,” he adds.
Drawing inspiration from zoos
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Why are corpse flower records so spotty in the first place? According to Murrell, the botanical community lags behind the zoological community when it comes to data management and standardized recordkeeping. But it’s starting to catch up, says Jones.
“It’s kind of taking a page out of the world of zoos,” he says. “Working with animals, it’s pretty common to track the genetic information of species across zoos. But in botanic gardens, it’s not been super common.”
New software tools are making it easier for institutions to track and share information about individual plants, and more botanic gardens are starting to take advantage of those, says Jones.
Members of the global botanical community are also starting to work together more closely on conservation—just like zoos and aquariums have long done. Conservationists are beginning to create a centralized “studbook” database for corpse flowers and other endangered plants, which works like a genetic map to prevent inbreeding. The U.S. Botanic Garden is hoping to organize a corpse flower conservation gathering later this year.
“It’s going to take botanic gardens to give conservation a chance with a plant like this,” says Jones. “And it’s going to take numerous botanic gardens, and they’re going to have to work together … If [titan arum] were to ever go extinct in the wild, the botanical collections would be even more important at that point. They would be the only chance for reintroduction in the wild.”
He adds: “Especially if you’re talking about a potential reintroduction of a species, you really need to know where the genetics come from. The records will be absolutely critical going forward.”
