Around 2:00 p.m., an excited crowd began to gather in the rainforest room of the California Academy of Sciences.
“Right now we’re looking at the corpse flower. I’m interested — it's kind of weird that I'm super excited to smell it. I've never said that in my life, but, um, it is super interesting. I've heard about it for many years, I’ve just never seen it before.”
This is Guillermo Hayes, he works here. At the center of his — and everyone else’s attention — was a gigantic, almost prehistoric looking flower, named Mirage.
“I heard it smells like, like a, a wet dog or a smelly feet or like spoiled cheese or something. But, um, all of that sounds nasty to me, but I'm just excited to smell it right now.”
He wasn’t the only one excited about the smell.
“Yeah, my name is Kyra Ortiz and I'm a biologist here at the Academy of Sciences.”
Ortiz says this is the first time Mirage has bloomed in 10 years.
“I'm standing here, and I've been standing here for the last 30 minutes, kind of watching it bloom or begin to bloom, and as it starts opening, I've been noticing more and more little flies. Fruit flies have been getting closer to it. We've seen some ants, we've even seen butterflies on it. Although, in the wild, what it’s getting pollinated by are carrion beetles and flies.”
Corpse flowers are incredibly rare. There are less than 1,000 of them in the wild, which means they’re endangered. They’re only native to one place in the world: Sumatra, an island of Indonesia. And they’re “thermogenic,” meaning they create their own heat.
“So it can reach almost a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and that will help perpetuate the smell. That's how it's able to release its essence high up into the canopy, miles away to attract all of those pollinators.”
In the wild, they can get as tall as 12 feet. But what makes them most unique is their reproductive strategy: they only bloom once every seven to 10 years and when they do bloom, they emit an odor that’s, well, corpselike. Onlookers described it like this:
“Like garlic and sweaty feet.”
“Like if you took your teenage son's dirty laundry. Put it in a trash bag, threw in some hamburger meat, and then left that in the desert sun for a week.”
“The inside of someone's gym bag. But like someone's gym bag that you love, you know?”
Corpse flower blooms can last up to 48 hours. When Mirage is done blooming, conservationists, biologists, and other scientists will begin the work of perpetuating her DNA.
