The Rafflesia flower is so big it could play Audrey II, the giant, human-eating plant in the musical, The Little Shop of Horrors. Well, maybe it's not that big and it doesn’t eat humans, but its nickname is the “corpse flower” because it smells like dead matter. So, it's got that going for it when it tries out for the musical lead. It seems to be the closest to we've got to Audrey II—this Southeast Asian beauty is the largest flower in the world.
Rafflesia plants have scaly, brownish leaves with dotted-white fleshy flowers that produce their famous flesh-scented odor or to disseminate seed from the male to the female parts of the plant. Some botanists think that the flower’s stench helps attract insects that carry its seeds to other locations.
In the center of the flower is a deep well with raised disks with numerous vertical spines. Underneath this disk are the plant's sexual organs—the male and female flowers within the Rafflesia are separate. The flowers range from inches to a meter in diameter. In terms of nutrition, the flower is a parasite, or it takes its host’s nutrients.
For the Rafflesia seed to geminate, the host plant’s vine must be damaged so the Rafflesia seed filaments can infiltrate the host properly. Damage to the vines can occur by trampling of large animals, whose hooves can also pass the Rafflesia seed.
The flower has 17 species found only in Southeast Asia including in Indonesia, Malaysia, Borneo and Thailand. The plant lives in altitudes of 500 to 700 meters in tropical rainforests, where the climate is warm and very humid. The plant is rare and it is even rarer to see it in bloom—the blossom of the Rafflesia takes up to ten months to gestate and only blooms for a few days.
The Rafflesia was discovered in 1818. Sir Stamford Raffles, who was Governor to Bencoolen in Sumatra and then at the administrative center for the British East India Company for Sumatra, discovered the plant. Raffles, along with Dr. Joseph Arnold, led an expedition into the Sumatran interior. On their travels, they discovered the flower, but botanists were confused about it for many years. Arnold died of jungle fever before the two Brits could present their findings to the Royal Society in London, of which both were members.
The plant made headlines in 2006 when one was discovered growing near a highway in Gerik, Malaysia. Before this plant was discovered in such a convenient location, Rafflesia lovers had to hike far into the forest to see any such specimens. Inhabitants of the town appealed to lawmakers to protect the clusters of plants near the highway because they feared that people would pluck the flower’s petals to make popular post-natal medicines sold throughout the country. This specific species of the Rafflesia was discovered in 1993 and has a diameter of 43 cm.
Since 2002, there has been a huge push by Filipino scientists to name and classify many more species of Rafflesia. Before their expeditions, there were only two names of Rafflesia currently in existence. Scientists have named ten more Rafflesia species in the last nine years; the most recent naming took place in 2010.
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