The odor of rotting human flesh could be smelt in San Jose State’s biology greenhouse garden, where a rare corpse flower, or “Terry Titan,” reached full bloom in mid-July.
Terry is the first corpse flower to bloom in Silicon Valley, meanwhile there are less than 1000 corpse flowers left in their natural habitat, which is subtropical areas, according to the U.S. Botanic Garden Corpse Flowers webpage.
The International Union for Conservation listed the corpse flower, or Titan Arum, as an endangered plant species in 2018, according to its Red List of Threatened Species webpage.
The International Union for Conservation is a membership union composed of both government and civil society organizations that work in the field of nature conservation and natural resources’ sustainability, according to its website.
Erika Snyder, senior biology and assistant greenhouse tender, said corpse flowers are rare because they take an unpredictably long time to bloom, the climate conditions need to be “absolutely perfect” and their ideal habitats are shrinking.
“[The corpse flowers] grow specifically in subtropical places like Thailand and Sumatra, where it's very specific conditions for them to live, have been deforested since forever, you know, because of things like palm oil, and whatnot,” Snyder said.
The forests where corpse flowers reside have been endangered due to logging where trees are cut down and then transported, according to the U.S. Botanic Garden Corpse Flowers webpage.
Terry started to bloom on July 26 and closed after 12 hours. Since then, the flower has completely deflated back into the soil and it may bloom again in a few years.
Lars Rosengreen, biology department’s greenhouse manager, said the greenhouse has three rooms: a cold house, temperate house and a tropical house, which is where the corpse flower resides.
Terry resides among a wide variety of plants including a mini-pineapple plant.
“We keep about 1,000 species of plants up here and about 150 different families and we use these plants mostly in courses to support courses,” Rosengreen said. “You can think of it a little bit like a library where a course can lend out books, except our books are plants.”
Rosengreenaid he spent eight years maintaining the perfect conditions required to get the corpse flower to finally bloom with the help of various students who have been in the biology department.
“[Rosengreen] is always in a battle to make sure the swamp coolers are working, the thermostat is working. You know, everything's humidity controlled . . . so [Rosengreen] is fantastic, very talented at keeping plants alive” Snyder said. “The craziest part though is that you have no idea really, if it is perfectly right for it until it starts to bloom.”
Rosengreen said before a corpse flower blooms, it will be in a vegetative state where a singular leaf will grow and then it will collapse into the ground. He said during that time, the flower is gathering sugar until it has enough energy to fully bloom.
“This [vegetative] form here is growing larger and larger and larger and as it grows larger, we keep on having to move it into larger pots. So every time it makes a new leaf, we wait for [and] when that leaf dies, then we dig it out and we actually weigh it and for this one it was a two person job . . . and then we clean up all the soil on it,” Rosengreen said. “We put it back in here with fresh soil and a larger pot and see where it goes from there.”
Currently, the university biology department’s tropical greenhouse has 17 corpse flowers, all in various states of its life cycle.
In late July, community members of the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) also saw the bloom of a corpse flower in their arboretum, according to a July 21 UCSC news release.
Snyder said because of its endangered status, these corpse flowers might be the only ones to exist in the future, making its growth even more valuable.
“The corpses that we have saved and preserved might be the only future specimens that we have someday that are stored in an herbarium because earth no longer possesses the climate for such organisms to grow,” Snyder said. “It's kind of a testament to the will of life.”
The plants’ rarity also explains the fascination many students have with the plants. The SJSU biology department set up a webcam so people can watch the bloom remotely.
Graduate student Charlotte Miranda said she hopes the fascination will translate to more students caring about the biodiversity of the planet.
“The corpse flower was kind of a unique opportunity to showcase that we have a lot of interesting research plants up here . . . and I think the corpse flower is a good way to demonstrate that you can really bring a community together around an organism, especially at SJSU,” Miranda said. “So it was exciting to share a little piece of what we get to do up here with everyone.”
Snyder expressed a similar sentiment and said she hopes everyone can find some interest in science.
“[The corpse flower] was just a beautiful little slice of the universe and of this world, the world that humans live on . . . I would just encourage everybody to look at some plants,” Snyder said.
