Tons of corpse flowers bloomed at the end of 2016 and scientists aren’t sure why

Once a relatively rare occurrence, dozens of corpse flowers bloomed throughout the world last year, and scientists are puzzled as to why so many of the putrid-smelling plants suddenly started opening and releasing their powerful odors over such a short time span.

According to the Huffington Post, a University of Wisconsin-Madison led study found that there were only 157 corpse flower blooms between 1880 and 2008. However, BBC News reported that since January 2016, at least 32 of the plants have bloomed, most of them in the US.

Officially known as the Amorphophallus titanum (which in Greek translated literally to “giant misshapen phallus”) but also called the titan arum, corpse flowers tend to require between 7 and 10 years of vegetative growth before blooming for the first time. Afterwards, however, the time needed for them to bloom again varies greatly, with some needing up to another decade.

Yet a funny thing happened last year. After a corpse flower at the New York Botanical Garden bloomed late last July, others started blooming just a few days later in Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida and Washington DC. Shortly after those flowers bloomed, one did in Colorado, and that was followed by several others in Missouri, Hawaii, New Hampshire and elsewhere.

And the corpse flowers aren’t just blooming in the US, either – blooms have also occurred in the UK, India, Australia, Belgium and Denmark, and while there have been a few theories as to why the plants’ blooming activity has apparently become synchronized, researchers have yet to come up with a solid answer as to why this is happening.

Related plants, improved horticultural care among possible explanations

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last summer, Marc Hachadourian, director of the Nolen Greenhouses at the New York Botanical Garden, said that he and some of his colleagues were asking “how did six or seven happen all at once?’” Several months later, he is still looking for the answer to the mystery, as he explained to BBC News earlier this week.

While experts have suggested that many of the corpse flowers currently being cultivated are the second-generation descendants of seeds distributed widely in 1990s, which would mean that they are loosely related and possibly explaining the recent increase in blooms, Hachadourian has his doubts about this theory. “I’ve talked to some of the other botanical gardens,” he told BBC News, “and I can’t seem to find a link that they all came from the same seed source.”

Officials at Kew Gardens in London, which was the site of 11 titan arum blooms between 2005 and 2009, believe that an increased number of corpse flowers in their collection and the efforts of their horticulturists in caring for the plants were the reasons for their success. Daniel Jansen from the University of Pittsburgh told the Wall Street Journal that the simultaneous activity might be intentional, as the flowers could increase their chances to cross-pollinate by blooming together.

Corpse flowers are hardly the only species of flower to undergo simultaneous blooming events, Hachadourian told BBC News, with the reasons varying by species. Since corpse flower studies have thus far been sparse, much work would need to be done to find a possible reason why they started blooming at the same time. “At this point,” he said, “only the plants know for sure.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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