Not all flowers smell like roses, but a new plant discovered in the Blue Mountains sprouts blooms that smell like rotting fish.
Botanist Greg Steenbeeke was one of three scientists to identify the new species in a small patch of rainforest in the Megalong Valley.
“I’ve gone past the point where we found the plant several times a year for two decades and never knew it was there,” said Mr Steenbeeke, the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage senior threatened species officer.
The fairy lantern is smaller than a five cent piece. Photo: Greg Steenbeeke
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Despite its wafty odour, the plant, botanical name Thismia megalongensis, is hard to spy – its small orange flowers grow on the forest floor and are smaller than a five cent piece.
“While it has a beautiful appearance with tiny orange flowers, this is no rose; the orange flowers give off a fungal odour when fresh and start to smell like ‘rotting fish’ as they decay,” he said.
The flower’s pong attracts insects like gnats, which feed on the nectar and then transport pollen to the next flower it visits.
The plant’s stench was likely caused by it feasting off a fungus, or fungi, which transfer nutrients from dead leaves and organisms in the soil to other plants.
Mr Steenbeeke said the plant belonged to a lineage of plants, commonly known as fairy lanterns, that first sprouted around the time of the dinosaurs.
“It is amazing that we can find a plant that has developed symbiotically with fungi over tens of millions of years and gone undetected near a large urban centre like Sydney,” Mr Steenbeeke said.
The new fairy lantern is so small its seeds can be knocked off their flowers and on to the forest floor by a single rain drop. It also lacks roots and leaves.
It was Mr Steenbeeke’s friend and horticulture TAFE teacher, Colin Hunt, who first spied the plant in 2011, initially believing it to be a specimen of a known plant.
But closer inspection suggested the flower was unique, and a specimen was sent to the Netherlands for genetic testing by Dr Vincent Merckx at Leiden University.
The tests revealed the orange flower’s closest relative is a plant found in New Zealand, some 4000 kilometres away.
“The connection suggests it has evolved in isolation for a very long time, and genetic research on the plant’s ‘molecular clock’ – a means of determining the time since separation from a common ancestor – suggests that these species actually separated from each other in the last 400,000 years,” Mr Steenbeeke said.
While about 90 per cent of plants native to eastern Australia have been identified and named, a couple of dozen new species are discovered every year, he said.