''Rhizanthes'' is a

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus com ...

of four species of

parasitic Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has c ...

flowering plants in the family

Rafflesiaceae The Rafflesiaceae are a family of rare parasitic plants comprising 36 species in 3 genera found in the tropical forests of east and southeast Asia, including ''Rafflesia arnoldii'', which has the largest flowers of all plants. The plants are end ...

. They are without leaves, stems, roots, or

photosynthetic Photosynthesis is a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy into chemical energy that, through cellular respiration, can later be released to fuel the organism's activities. Some of this chemical energy is stored in c ...

tissue, and grow within the roots of a few species of ''

Tetrastigma ''Tetrastigma'' is a genus of plants in the grape family, Vitaceae. The plants are lianas that climb with tendrils and have palmately compound leaves. Plants are dioecious, with separate male and female plants; female flowers are characterized ...

'' vines. The genus is limited to the tropical forests of

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, south-eastern region of Asia, consistin ...

. The flowers of ''Rhizanthes'' are very large, they vary from 14 to 43 cm in diameter. At least one species of ''Rhizanthes'', ''Rh. lowii'', is

endotherm An endotherm (from Greek ἔνδον ''endon'' "within" and θέρμη ''thermē'' "heat") is an organism that maintains its body at a metabolically favorable temperature, largely by the use of heat released by its internal bodily functions inste ...

ic.

Names

The Latin name derives from the compound of the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

words ῥίζα (pronounced ''rhíza''), meaning 'root', with the word ἄνθος ( ''anthos'') meaning 'flower'. 'Malay'

vernacular name A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...

s used for ''Rhizanthes zippelii'' according to Betty Molesworth Allen in 1967 were ''bunga pakma'' and ''bunga padma'', presumably, with the taxonomic changes, those names could actually refer to any species except ''Rh. zippelii''. The word ''bunga'' means flower; both names are shared by plants in the related genus ''

Rafflesia ''Rafflesia'' () is a genus of parasitic flowering plants in the family Rafflesiaceae. The species have enormous flowers, the buds rising from the ground or directly from the lower stems of their host plants; one species has the largest flowers i ...

''.

Description

The flowers of ''Rhizanthes'' are very large, they vary from 14 to 43 cm in diameter. The flower is scentless when it first opens, but the odour soon grows fetid and rank, smelling of rotting carrion. At least one species of ''Rhizanthes'', ''Rh. lowii'', is

ic. It not only produces its own heat, but has the rare ability to regulate its own temperature.

Similar genera

The only plants remotely similar to ''Rhizanthes'' are those in the genus ''

'', but the similarly giant and foul-smelling flowers of ''Rafflesia'' always have five

perianth The perianth (perigonium, perigon or perigone in monocots) is the non-reproductive part of the flower, and structure that forms an envelope surrounding the sexual organs, consisting of the calyx (sepals) and the corolla (petals) or tepals when ...

-lobes. ''Rhizanthes'', on the other hand, have many more -there are generally 14 to 18 of such lobes, the number can vary. These lobes are furthermore different by ending in a long hanging strips, with its flesh colour and texture, the flower thus looking like a big, fat, dead octopus on its head.

Taxonomy

In the newest revision of the genus, Hans Bänziger and Bertel Hansen recognised the following species in 2000: *'' Rhizanthes deceptor'' Bänziger & B.Hansen *'' Rhizanthes infanticida'' Bänziger & B.Hansen *'' Rhizanthes lowii'' (Becc.) Harms *'' Rhizanthes zippelii'' (Blume) Spach The first species to be discovered was ''Rh. zippelii'', which was first described as ''Brugmansia zippelii'' in Java by

Carl Ludwig Blume Charles Ludwig de Blume or Karl Ludwig von Blume (9 June 1796, Braunschweig – 3 February 1862, Leiden) was a German-Dutch botanist. He was born at Braunschweig in Germany, but studied at Leiden University and spent his professional life wor ...

in 1828. The name ''

Brugmansia ''Brugmansia'' is a genus of seven species of flowering plants in the nightshade family Solanaceae. They are woody trees or shrubs, with pendulous flowers, and have no spines on their fruit. Their large, fragrant flowers give them their common n ...

'' had earlier been used to house the plants known as angel trumpets, but as this name had sunk into synonymy with ''

Datura ''Datura'' is a genus of nine species of highly poisonous, vespertine-flowering plants belonging to the nightshade family Solanaceae. They are commonly known as thornapples or jimsonweeds, but are also known as devil's trumpets (not to be conf ...

'', this was generally ignored at the time. The genus was first proposed to be renamed by

Barthélemy Charles Joseph Dumortier Barthélemy Charles Joseph Dumortier (; 3 April 1797 in Tournai – 9 July 1878) was a Belgian who conducted a parallel career of botanist and Member of Parliament. Biography Barthélemy Dumortier was a son of the merchant and city councillor Ba ...

in 1829 when he also first created the

family Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...

, but this publication seems not to have been widely known. In 1841

Ludwig Reichenbach Heinrich Gottlieb Ludwig Reichenbach (8 January 1793 – 17 March 1879) was a German botanist and ornithologist. It was he who first requested Leopold Blaschka to make a set of glass marine invertebrate models for scientific education and museu ...

proposed to move the species to ''Mycetanthe'', but he was similarly ignored. ''Brugmansia lowii'' was the second species to be named, described by

Odoardo Beccari Odoardo Beccari (16 November 1843 – 25 October 1920) was an Italian botanist famous for his discoveries in Indonesia, particularly New Guinea, and Australia. He has been called the greatest botanist to ever study Malesia. His author abbreviat ...

in 1868. ''B. bakhuizenii'' was the third species, named by

Emil Johann Lambert Heinricher Emil Johann Lambert Heinricher (14 November 1856 – 13 July 1934) was an Austrian botanist from Laibach (Ljubljana). In 1879 he received his doctorate from the University of Graz, where after graduation, he served as an assistant to botanist ...

after his 1903/04 trip to the island for a taxon with a different flower colour on Java. At least Reichenbach was remembered. In 1930

Bénédict Pierre Georges Hochreutiner Bénédict Pierre Georges Hochreutiner (1873-1959) was a Swiss botanist and plant taxonomist.Nationaal Herbarium NederlandBiographical page retrieved 2009-03-30 A native of Saint-Gall, he studied theology and natural sciences in Geneva. In 1896 he ...

moved two of the known

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; plural taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular nam ...

to his genus ''Mycetanthe''. In 1934

Hermann Harms Hermann August Theodor Harms (16 July 1870 – 27 November 1942) was a German taxonomist and botanist. Harms was born in Berlin. He worked as a botanist at the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum, Botanical Museum in Berlin. ...

pointed out that Dumortier's name had priority, but he only moved ''M. lowii'' to ''Rhizanthes'', not the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specimen ...

of the genus ''Brugmansia''. This was rectified by

Édouard Spach Édouard Spach (23 November 1801 – 18 May 1879) was a French botanist. The son of a merchant in Strasbourg, in 1824 he went to Paris, where he studied botany with René Desfontaines (1750–1831) and Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836). ...

the same year. In the 1963 (English version of the) ''Flora of Java'' C. A. Backer and R. C. Bakhuizen van den Brink reduced ''B. bakhuizenii'' to a synonym of ''Rh. zippelii''. They recognised two forms -somewhat confusingly, perhaps over-modestly, leaving them nameless. The form with which ''bakhuizenii'' was synonymised to was found in the most number of places, the original Blume form had only been seen a handful of times. In 1988

Willem Meijer Willem Meijer (1923 – 22 October 2003) was a Dutch botanist and plant collector. Background and education Meijer was born in 1923 in The Hague, Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 1951. Meijer travelled to J ...

and J. F. Veldkamp explained that the difference in flower colour was the result of the normal change in flower colour that the occurred during

anthesis Anthesis is the period during which a flower is fully open and functional. It may also refer to the onset of that period. The onset of anthesis is spectacular in some species. In ''Banksia'' species, for example, anthesis involves the extension ...

– the whitish flower of the Blume form was simply a flower on its first day of opening, and thus found it unjustified to recognise the two forms. The difference between the two species ''Rh. zippelii'' and ''Rh. lowii'' had always been unclear -the plants had only been collected a limited number of times, and ''Rh. lowii'' has been synonymised with the older species at least twice by different workers (Hooker in 1873, Bänziger in 1995), but this had been generally ignored by most people. In order to find a morphological basis for separating the taxa Meijer and Veldkamp used the shapes of the 'ramenta' – minute stalked outgrowths found on the inside of the perigone tube, having found these useful in differentiating the related ''

''. Bänziger and Hansen were unsure of how applicable this was, finding the characters were inconsistent and did not clearly separate all of the specimens into geographically distinct groups, resolving to use a large group of morphological traits and the larger number of specimens which had since been collected to clear this up. They found that the ramenta were indeed mixed between specimens, but that they could roughly be split into four groups, although some of these 'groups' were only based on a handful of specimens. A number of characteristics were ambiguous, mixed or had ranges which overlapped with other groups, making them inadequate for differentiating taxa. Notwithstanding this, however, they decided to recognised their groups at a species level, reasoning that regardless the

phylogeny A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...

, it would be potentially more advantageous to recognise them as four rare

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

s for environmental, financial and political reasons, giving spunky names to their new taxa: ''Rh. deceptor'' and ''Rh. infanticida''.

Distribution

According to Bänziger and Hansen's new

circumscription Circumscription may refer to: *Circumscribed circle *Circumscription (logic) *Circumscription (taxonomy) * Circumscription theory, a theory about the origins of the political state in the history of human evolution proposed by the American anthrop ...

, specimens collected on Java belong to the species ''Rhizanthes zippelii'', while specimens collected on Borneo belong to ''Rh. lowii''. Those collected on Sumatra may belong to either ''Rh. deceptor'' or ''Rh. infanticida'', and those collected in southern Thailand or western Malaysia belong to ''Rh. infanticida''.

Ecology

This strange plant is a

holoparasite An obligate parasite or holoparasite is a parasitic organism that cannot complete its life-cycle without exploiting a suitable host. If an obligate parasite cannot obtain a host it will fail to reproduce. This is opposed to a facultative parasite, ...

of the roots of the jungle

liana A liana is a long- stemmed, woody vine that is rooted in the soil at ground level and uses trees, as well as other means of vertical support, to climb up to the canopy in search of direct sunlight. The word ''liana'' does not refer to a ta ...

s in the genus ''

'', a plant related to the grape vine. In the

Sundanese language Sundanese (: , ; Sundanese script: ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by the Sundanese. It has approximately 40 million native speakers in the western third of Java; they represent about 15% of Indonesia's total population. Classifica ...

the host vine '' Tetrastigma papillosum'' is known as ''susuan'', thus the name for ''Rhizanthes zippelii'' is ''perut susuan'', the 'belly of ''susuan. ''Rhizanthes zippelii'' appears to prefer to grow in the densest thickets in tropical rainforest on steep slopes, which is one reason it is little seen.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q4394588 Rafflesiaceae Malpighiales genera