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RE: Floral Scent - Part 6 (and a stinky end to this series!)
Great post! Strangely relevant, as my boyfriend just told me Amorphophallus titanum is his favorite flower (always rooting for the underdog). Glad to learn more about it. I wonder what the evolutionary benefit is of smelling like rotting vegetables and stinky feet.
The evolutionary benefit of these foul smells seems to be for the flower to attract flies that would normally lay their eggs on rotting animal (or plant) tissues. Some flies are attracted to dead animals and others to rotting vegetable matter. The titan arum essentially tricks the flies into thinking that they are visiting a corpse or rotting vegetable matter. During their visits to the titan arum flower the flies are laden with pollen which the flies can then transfer to other flowers, achieving cross-pollination and sexual reproduction for the titan arum. The "sweaty feet" smell is just one part of a complex mixture of stinky odors which resemble those emitted by dead animals.