A Stinking Cheat
Created | Updated Feb 14, 2009
An Arum Lily blooms above a cliff. Its clean swept curves arrest my wandering eye. But whose eyes is it meant for? - Not for mine.
The gulls are outraged by my bold approach. They dive-bomb, scold and try to drive me back: a predator who might kill and steal their young - an undesirable alien in their midst.
I run the gauntlet of their angry beaks, slithering and sliding on guano, festering fish-waste, gull corpses, wriggling with maggots. My aim is to see the lovely plant at closer range. But as I draw near, the evil odour grows stronger and more putrid than a sewer.
It's called "The Dead Horse Arum"1 - and it's big. What, from the distance, looked a delicate pink spathe2, at closer quarters, resembles rotting flesh. Inside, flies crawl through bogus, blood-red hair, in search of corruption, to feed and lay their eggs.
They're fooled entirely by this fetid plant. It grows among the putrid leavings of the gulls, where flies swarm thickly in the breeding season. Competing for their attention, it's pollinated because it out-stinks any carrion we can imagine. To amplifying its message, it generates heat3, to lure the unsuspecting blowflies from a greater distance.
Inside the flies are trapped by slippery spikes, radiating like the spokes of a broken cartwheel, between the clusters of male and female flowers. They look in vain for ripe, decaying meat, meandering round the female, lower, spadix.
All night they're kept imprisoned by the cheat - until morning, when the slippery spikes dry up, allowing access to the outside world. Beyond the shrivelling barrier, the male flowers of the upper spadix have, in the meantime, erupted in sulphur-coloured pollen - bright coveralls, to coat the fleeing hordes.
Then, the innocent prisoners escaped at last, coated in sticky pollen, fly away searching for rank offal once more. The foulest smells along the cliff will draw them - to fertilise the next livid-pink deceiver - and once again spend the night in prison.
1Helicodiceros muscivorus2The spectacular 'bloom' that looks like a flower is, in fact, a 'spathe', ie a leaf-like bract. This forms a protective funnel around the 'spadix', which is a spike of tiny flowers - male at the top and female at the bottom.3The Dead horse arum is a member of the small group of thermogenic plants.
