Scientists discover how some flowers mimic the smell of death

How Some Flowers Evolved the Grossest Stench — and Why Flies Love It

Flowers keep making the same mutation time and time again.

The Genetics of Putrid-Smelling Flowers

Flowers enchant us with their alluring perfumes—lavender’s calming aroma or honeysuckle’s sugary scent. But some flowers are downright malodorous, including corpse flowers, whose shocking smell (and infrequent blooms) attracts people to botanical gardens in droves. When a species called Amorphophallus gigas bloomed in Brooklyn this past winter, visitors waited hours for a cautious sniff of the deathly odor. Another plant, Rafflesia arnoldi, prod…

Scientists discover how some flowers mimic the smell of death

As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but (discounting that vinegar is actually a great way to trap fruit flies), there’s an even better method: smell like rotting meat. As a subset of flowering plants figured out long ago, many flies and some beetles are drawn to the putrid and foul over the pretty and floral. Exploited correctly, these insects‘ instincts can make them great pollinators.But how does a flower conjure …

Some plants attract pollinating insects not with sweet scents, but with the stench of decomposition. As flowers produce these "stinks", biologists have now discovered using DNA comparisons of Asarum plants. According to this, the flower cells in some species show changes in their genetic material in a single gene. Due to these mutations, the coded enzyme no longer provides like [...] The article Origin of the carotid odor of some flowers discove…