Smells of garlic, rotten flesh and sweaty feet are in the air at the California Academy of Sciences.
The San Francisco museum’s resident corpse flower, Mirage, began blooming Tuesday afternoon on the first floor of the Osher Rainforest exhibition. Cal Academy officials said that the flower, which just reached the average age of maturity for blooming, is producing at an unseasonably early time during winter.
“Because of the tremendous energy needed to flower, Mirage may never bloom again or will take an additional two to three years to produce another flower,” a museum spokesperson said in a statement.
The corpse flower is native to Sumatra, an island in Indonesia. Unlike typical plants, corpse flowers do not have an annual blooming cycle because their blooms emerge from the corm, a huge underground stem. The blooms require warm temperatures and high humidity.
Known as Amorphophallus titanum, or titan arum, the corpse flower’s blooms can reach up to 10 feet in height. Mirage currently checks in at just over 5-foot-5 but is expected to reach 7 feet in full bloom.
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With fewer than 1,000 plants remaining in the wild, the International Union for Conservation of Nature considers the flower “endangered." The flower’s population has reduced more than 50% over the past 150 years, with U.S. Botanic Garden officials attributing the declines to logging and the conversion of tropical forests to oil palm plantations.
Biologists and horticulturists from Cal Academy’s Steinhart Aquarium have been caring for Mirage for the past five years, ever since the Conservatory of Flowers gifted it to the institution.
Once the flower’s phallus has extended, an outer protective sheath known as the spathe will unfurl to reveal hundreds of tiny flowers and a maroon lining. The dark color and putrid smells are meant to imitate a dead animal, which will attract insects like dung beetles and flesh flies to pollinate the plant.
Cal Academy visitors can expect the corpse flower’s bloom to last for 24 to 36 hours. If pollinated, the corpse flower will produce bright red fruit with a fleshy texture for roughly the next nine months. Once that fruit is ripe, the plant enters a dormant period and emerges as a leaf until it is ready for another bloom.
In addition to a viewing on the first floor, guests will also be able to see the bloom from above on the Osher Rainforest exhibition’s second-floor ramp.
