Not many things are as fascinating as Amorphophallus titanum, also known as the ‘corpse flower,’ and it’s under threat of extinction due to various factors – habitat destruction, climate change, invasive species encroachment, and now incomplete historical records.
As it happens, scientists constructing the ancestry of corpse flowers living in collections at institutions and gardens around the world have discovered a widespread lack of consistent and standardized data, according to a report by phys.org published on April 3.
Bad recordkeeping -> low genetic diversity -> extinction
Indeed, such incomplete recordkeeping habits have prevented conservationists from making informed decisions regarding corpse flower breeding, leading to 24% of them being clones and 27% being offspring from two closely related individuals, and, consequently, major risks for survival.
In the words of Olivia Murrell, who led the study, this low genetic diversity carries many risks, including a “decrease in fitness,” as inbred plants produce less pollen or might outright die after flowering. This includes cases where the offspring were albino, unable to survive because of the lack of chlorophyll to photosynthesize.
“The population as a whole also doesn’t have the variation it needs to survive. So, if a disease or pest affects plants that are all genetically similar, all plants in that population are more likely to suffer. We don’t think people are consciously making the choice to inbreed their plants. They just don’t know what they have because the data are incomplete.”
Notably, the corpse flower, which got its name due to the odor that mimics rotting flesh to attract flies and carrion beetles, its primary pollinators, is now at risk of becoming extinct because of this surprising factor – improper recordkeeping.
To illustrate, when Murrell asked for information on all the living collections around the world containing corpse flowers, she received it in the form of handwritten notes, lists, prose, and spreadsheets, often missing data like the plant’s origin, parent, characteristics, health, and propagation, which is critical to conservation efforts.
“The highest rate of missing data occurred when plants were transferred to new locations. (…) The plants moved, but their data didn’t move with them. So, records easily got lost over time as plants move around.”
At the time of her study, Murrell was a Master’s student in plant biology in the Program in Plant Biology and Conservation, a partnership between Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Chicago Botanic Garden. She’s now a Ph.D. student at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK and a conservation scholar at the Chester Zoo.
Breeding logistics in the way of corpse flower survival
Other problems involve breeding logistics, as typically, the “female flowers open first, and then the male flowers open later.” In other words, the “female flowers are no longer viable by the time pollen is produced.” Additionally, as Murrell explained, the corpse flower’s blooming behavior is erratic:
“The plant also blooms rarely and unpredictably. It could go seven to 10 years without blooming. Then, when the blooms do open, the female flowers are only viable for a couple of hours. With that limited time to pollinate, conservationists scramble to use whatever they have on hand. That might be pollen from a previous flower on the same individual, which results in inbreeding.”
Elsewhere, the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, Australia, earlier this year witnessed the first blooming of the corpse flower in 15 years, gathering a crowd of over 20,000 onlookers, some of which weren’t even born when the plant bloomed the last time.
Meanwhile, only an estimated 162 individual corpse flowers remain in the wild, the rest of them thriving in ‘living collections’ within research facilities, botanic gardens, and arboreta, where scientists are trying to propagate the species and prevent it from dying out – something that bad recordkeeping isn’t exactly helping with.
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