Corpse+Lily

      **//  Amorphaphollus Titanum //****  (aka “The Corpse Lily”) **

Imagine… you are in the rainforest of Sumatra with your family. You are taking a scenic hike through the Bukit Barisan Mountains. Suddenly you smell an extremely foul smell. You push aside a bush only to find a huge flower. It has a large hole in the middle and bumpy spots all over its gigantic petals. You decide that you should probably leave once you see flies swarming over the lily. Later you do some research and find that the unusual looking flower you saw earlier today was called a “Corpse Lily”. Why is it called the corpse lily? Because it is the deadliest flower in the world. Not really, it just smells like decaying flesh. That is especially hard to believe because it’s a relative of the grape!   The corpse lily is not a flower that you can pick. That’s because it is the world’s largest flower. It can grow from 36 inches in width, with petals 1 inch thick and 18 inches long, and weighs up to15 pounds! It’s also only in full bloom for a week. In fact, the Corpse Lily has been named “the Stinking Corpse Lily” and “Voodoo Lily” because of its foul odor. Not only that, it’s ugly, so it definitely will not blend in with other lilies. There are no leaves or stems, but it has a thick wooden vine that attaches itself to the ground. The Corpse Lily is part of the Plant Kingdom, Plantae in Latin.   The plantae kingdom has various characteristics. The plant is multicellular meaning it has more than one cell. The plant is eukaryotic meaning it has a nucleus. The nucleus is the biggest part of the cell that holds DNA. Humans are eukaryotic because we have a nucleus too. The plantae kingdom uses photosynthesis to produce food called glucose (a type of sugar). It also has a cell wall, which is a rigid “shell” to keep the cell intact. Humans have cell membranes, which is a smoother shell for our cells. The corpse lily, however, obtains nutrients from the tissues of the grape vine that they live on. Occasionally, a large “cabbage-like” flower busts through the wooden grape vine and eventually grows into a full corpse lily.   The Corpse Lily is famous for many different things such as its unusual nicknames, its huge size, its appearance, or maybe just its odor. You may think that it would be cool to go pick one but you would get in a lot trouble since they are a rare, endangered plant. You can just think of it as a 15 pound grape… with a gigantic hole and white bumpy spots covering the red colored petals. So next time you eat a grape, know that it is a family member of the smelliest flower in the world.   Ashlyn, Abbey, Timon Pd. 1