Yo I saw your post on your love of skunk cabbages, and I see a ton of them by the creek back home. I’ve never paid them much attention so I was curious as to why do you like them so much? I’m SO ready to fall in love with yet another plant
-in my opinion the eastern skunk cabbage is one of the smartest and coolest plants ever
-i originally fell into them because of my research interest regarding thermogenic plants! these plants produce heat when they bloom. in the Eastern Skunk Cabbage’s case, the first week- where the female blooms are presented- the plant keeps its internal flower temperature at an exact, consistant temperature, which they do by measuring the exact outer temperature and adjusting their flower’s temperature accordingly. we dont know how they measure the outer temperature, only the part of the plant that does. the second week- when the male flowers are presented- the plant continues to heat up, but the heating patterns are much more erratic and have higher and lower variability.
-eastern skunk cabbages are deep rooted plants with contractile roots. contractile roots are roots in a ring structure that fill with water, then squeeze them out, draging them deep into the mud. the reason the ESC in both its vegetative and flowering stages is so close to the ground is that the plant grows downward, dragging itself deeper into the mud each year it blooms.
-the life span of these plants are unknown, but we know that these plants plan their blooms literal years ahead. like if you were to uproot one and cut it down the middle, you would see this years’ bloom, then the next years bloom nestled down in the tuber waiting to come up. and another one under that. and another one under that. it goes on until you hit the tiniest blooming structure being developed at the bottom of the tuber, which apparently is about the size of a tip of a ballpoint pen and can be the planned fruiting structure for up to ten years in the future.
-they are stinky babs when crushed bc their pollinators are newly-emerging flies and beetles.
-theyre literally like the most comically disgusting plants ever like they love living in bogs and having cold, wet mud over their roots at all times of the year and smell like rotting flesh
-did i mention that they’re the first to bloom in the early spring by blooming first, using the heat they produce during bloom to burn through the snow??? bc they do that
-also btw they aren’t actual cabbages, idk y theyre called that
-if you eat them uncooked they’ll secrete acid that will burn ur mouth and throat. that being said, these plants were used by indigenous peoples as a common food/medicine when cooked, especially the root!
some cool pics from iowaplants.com (go to that link to learn more about their really weird flowering structure and physiology, which is the same throughout the ultra-weird aroid family but is a really good example):
the seeding structure (the weird yellow ball in the middle of pic 1, dried and floating down a nearby stream, where the flowering structures break open and drop seeds downstream from the parent):
the yellow ball is called the “spadix”. this is the part that heats up, and is actually many flowers, as demonstrated in this close up:
the babs in their non-flowering phase in spring, summer, and fall:
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