Biologist cracks plant’s putrid code

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, February 5th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the smell of death.

The Amorphophallus titanum, known much more commonly as the corpse flower, is considered endangered. There are only about 1-thousand of these stinky plants left.

They’re on display in botanical gardens around the world and each time one blooms, thousands of people wait in line for hours for a whiff. Demanding an answer, why?

WORLD correspondent Amy Lewis talked with a biologist who has studied the phenomenon.

ERIC SCHALLER: If you put your hand up against it, it basically feels like body temperature. So it is, fairly feels animal-like in that respect.

AMY LEWIS: Molecular biologist and weird horror fiction author Eric Schaller is no stranger to death.

SCHALLER: My dad’s a wildlife biologist, so I grew up around dead animals. There would be skulls on the roof of our house in other countries…

Schaller works with plants instead of animals. But he has been fascinated with the corpse flower since he studied one nine years ago at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth University.

Besides heating up to body temperature, the corpse flower plant grows from an underground potato-like corm to a 6-foot tall spadix hugged by a large pleated green spathe in just two weeks. Then for only 24 hours, the spathe turns a deep, meaty red and unfurls. The whole thing warms up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and exudes a death-like stench that attracts carrion beetles, flies—and scientists.

SCHALLER: There's been a fair amount of analysis of what the gas composition was that is emitted to mimic rotting odor smells.

But Schaller couldn’t find any studies on the molecular biology of the plant—basically, how it stinks. So he jumped at the chance to study it when a corpse flower corm in the greenhouse at Dartmouth showed signs of blooming.

SCHALLER: I got there around midnight and had liquid nitrogen containers, collected tissue samples from various parts of the inflorescence, and was saving those. And then I went back over several more nights to collect further samples.

For the next few years, Schaller collected samples every time one of the university’s corpse flowers bloomed. But spending even a little time in a greenhouse with a plant that exudes putrid smells has unintended consequences.

SCHALLER: When I'm up there, there's the shirt that gets rank with odor. But then if I'm trying to sleep for an hour or two, then I have a separate set of shirts for that. And when I go home, they basically my wife says, yeah, I have to get rid of all my clothes…

The smell doesn’t stop hordes of curious people from lining up to see these huge, scarce, short-lived, stinky, heat-producing plants.

SCHALLER: Kids get drawn to, I mean things that smell bad. You think, you bring your friends over and say, ‘This really stinks’ sort of thing. It's an extreme sensation, and we want to see a little bit more what it's like.

That was certainly true for 12-year-old Hudson Mantzaris from Geelong, Australia. He walked to the botanic gardens after school to see their specimen late last year.

MANTZARIS: We seen on the internet that it smells like a corpse and stuff, and we wanted to see if it was blooming or not.

Todd Coleman visited the greenhouse after work. He used to live in a funeral home where he sometimes smelled what the flower is named for. He’s curious if the corpse flower will live up to its name.

COLEMAN: I would assume not a lot of people would want to experience, because it smells so terrible, but that’s why I want to experience it because it’s so different and unique.

SOUND: [Frogs and people chatting]

For the next 24 hours, twenty thousand people wait in a line that snakes past a pond, out the gates, and around a parking lot. From grandparents with walkers to parents pushing babies in strollers, everyone slowly files past to see, smell, and take a selfie with this odiferous phenomenon.

VAUGHAN: I knew it was going to smell like something. I just didn't know it was going to smell that bad. But a dead whale smells worse.

WOMAN: It smells like a popped kangaroo, like a kangaroo that’s popped. It does.

Conversations dwindle as the visitors finally enter the greenhouse doors to file past the corpse flower. The time of visitation has finally come.

EVELYN: This is so exciting.

SHARON: It’s like a revered silence. This is so interesting.

Back in New Hampshire, Schaller’s team proved and recently published their hypotheses about the amino acid methionine and putrescine, the bad smell that decomposing bodies produce.

SCHALLER: The novel discovery was really putrescine as being a component of the odor. Putrescine had not been previously identified because it tends to break down.

His discoveries don’t change anything for the crowd waiting to see the corpse flower. They want to see—and smell—something macabre and have a unique experience.

XAVIER: Just for that little moment. I mean, we can say, now we saw a corpse flower. In bloom.

MAN: It smells. Yeah, I got a waft of warm air and then the smell and I was like… [gagging sound]

Even if they have to stand in line for a really long time.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis in Geelong, Victoria, Australia.

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