r/mildlyinteresting • u/Rejectyd • 1d ago
My friends Starfish Cactus bloomed - apparently they smell like rotten meat
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u/Magister5 1d ago
Seems like it would smell like butthole
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u/joestaff 1d ago
Almost looks like one too
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u/AdSudden3941 1d ago
Doesnt feel like one
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u/tdquiksilver 1d ago
Prove it
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u/AdSudden3941 1d ago
My dick has the mumps and smells like pollinated shit.
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u/Twizzlers_and_donuts 1d ago
The first few blooms on my orbea variegata didn’t have too strong of a smell on a day with still air but the moment a breeze hit it you could smell it across the yard. Loved my rotten fish smelling plant. I really want more types of carrion plants like the lifesaver plant!
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u/FresYES_Kevin 1d ago
it's hot in the desert, not bee friendly, so stinky plants use flys for pollination
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u/Coletteduvs 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/tGHCqrOZf44nK
Keep it out just in case
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u/Whoreson_Welles 1d ago
My parents grew stapeliads for years, there's a family pic, not digitized, of a bloom set outdoors and crawling with flies. They really stink, hoo-wee! Funny aside; they are native to Botswana (and other nations in Southern Africa) and a fellow student of my mother's in the Nursing baccalaureate program was Botswanan, and I'll never forget her face when she turned to my mom in astonishment and asked her why she was growing ***weeds***. (Botswanans are cattle people, culturally, and cattle can't eat stapeliads.)
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u/_S1syphus 1d ago
Once i learned that "weed" and "vermin" are arbitrary judgements more than a scientific category I've never stopped being upset by it. Teaching people some kinds of plants and animals are incompatible with eachother? No no, let's make the claim that these living things are categorically harmful, that they're a universal antagonist against which all violence is not only justifiable but good actually
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u/Whoreson_Welles 1d ago
When the elders tell me they want something off their land I tend to side with them, and they don't generally use terms like weed and vermin when novel species start to hurt their biome.
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u/_S1syphus 1d ago
No no that's fair, im just griping about the way we talk about it as a whole. Obviously if the cool corpse plants are gonna get in the way of your farming then you should clear them, it's just the whole weed/vermin thing cultivates an incurious, hostile mindset imo
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u/SlouchyGuy 1d ago
Really opened my eyes to it after I saw a video of a botanist who talked about edible wild plants. I've read about stone age people eating whatever, and the fact that have incredibly varied diet due to foraging, but that's tropics, whatever.
No, turns out most of the things that we see as weeds or just an everyday plant are edible, nice taste too, we just didn't get to domesticate them for whatever reason. Like orach is edible, I used to remove it from the garden beds
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u/I_need_a_date_plz 1d ago
Stargazer lillies are lovely to look at but I cannot stand the way they smell. People tell me it’s a lovely perfumed smell. Meanwhile I get nauseous and have to like them from a distance to avoid vomiting from the smell.
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u/DesignOwn3977 1d ago
They do! And flies pollinate them, so when you find flies annoying, remember they have a purpose too ❤️
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u/TheRealSkele 1d ago
Sounds like fly propaganda, and I won't hear it.
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u/DesignOwn3977 1d ago
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u/thebiologyguy84 1d ago
Apparently??? You're next to it...give it a sniff and report back to us what the smell is!
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u/Dystopian_Ennui 1d ago
It look like something that wants to eat your face and lay eggs in your skull.
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u/Spicy__Sloth 1d ago
How bad is the odor radius on that thing when you're standing right next to it?
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u/Syssareth 1d ago
Not bad. We used to have one just like the one in the OP and you can maybe get a whiff from a few feet away if the breeze is just right, but you pretty much have to sniff the flower to really get the smell. (And the smell isn't all that strong even up close, nor does it really smell like rotten meat, just kind of in the same neighborhood. It's somewhat unpleasant, not gag-a-maggot.)
Of course, that's outdoors. I make no such promises if you're shortsighted enough to keep it as a houseplant, lol.
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u/Wolfbible 1d ago
My mom brought a couple pots of these home from a friend's house once because her friend couldn't get them to bloom. My mom did. First and last time she ever owned those plants. Took weeks for the dead body smell to leave our back patio area.
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u/Kind_Of_A_Dick 1d ago
Starfish is slang for a butthole. Is that relevant?
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u/elfy4eva 1d ago
Chocolate starfish
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u/TheHighSeasPirate 1d ago
Mine has bloomed off and on for 5 years now and has never smelled like anything other than cactus.
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u/fellaneedahandpls 1d ago
They do that for some reason
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u/abdayk23 1d ago
Do we know what reason that might be?
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u/Medium_Anteater_5280 1d ago
Likely evolution - before our traditional flowering plants, angiosperms, that brought pollinators like bees and things, there were pollinators like beetles and insects who like nasty shit.
So that’s why some plants smell like nasty shit. They’re “older” than flowers that smell good to us (for the most part), which means their pollinators are likely those that enjoy rotten or shit smells.
Same with those magnolia plants that smell like cum, some people say sasparilla.
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u/According_Register55 1d ago
Why are you saying they’re older?
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u/Medium_Anteater_5280 1d ago
Because they developed earlier on the geologic timescale
Angiosperms came about in Jurassic/Triassic, and this type of pollination occurred at least early Jurassic, which is actually quite a time gap despite being in the same period.
Beetle pollination is the oldest type of pollination, so naturally you’d gather that plants beetles pollinate are “older” than the others. Just a way to simply it down to a paragrpah
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u/According_Register55 1d ago
Beetles pollinate hundreds of plant species including both sweet and foul smelling.
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u/Medium_Anteater_5280 1d ago
Yeah they do, I’m not arguing against that
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u/According_Register55 1d ago
My point is that it seems as if you’re saying that foul smelling flowers evolved before sweet smelling flowers, but that seems like conjecture.
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u/laserunfocused143 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have a few of these and the blooms don't smell like rotten meat?
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u/netflix_and_pizza 1d ago
looks exactly like a demogorgon from stranger things. i'm half expecting it to open its mouth and scream. the fleshy petals plus the rotten meat scent is straight up horror movie material imo
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u/DisenfranchisedCynic 1d ago
Scent compounds of carrion flowers responsible for their odour include diamines (putrescine and cadaverine), sulfur compounds and various phenolic molecules.
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u/ConclusionOne1600 1d ago
Mine bloom and their outside so I don't notice the smell BUT I did notice the flys like to sit on them eeweww.
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u/Neat-Beautiful-5505 1d ago
I’ve smelt a few “starfish” in my day, and rotten meat would’ve been a pleasant surprise.
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u/Rasberrycello 1d ago
Nah, dog. Your neighbor just did some heinous shit a few days ago, and your cactus just HAPPENED to bloom today ;)
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u/YanceyGlenn 1d ago
We've all had a stinky starfish at least once in our lives. Let's be a little kinder to this plant.
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u/ScowlyBrowSpinster 1d ago
The pattern going into the center is suckin me in! Such a cool patterned blossom. I couldn't handle the stank, tho.
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u/Mainly_Miserable 1d ago
These are all over the hills near my house. They remind me of Stranger Things.
https://giphy.com/gifs/kopN26K2ThF9j7RL4K
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u/Minimum-Flight2334 1d ago
Had one of these. Didnt smell too bad. But tons of flies hung out there.
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u/themightythor2024 1d ago
Plants that smell like rotten meat are often pollinated by flies instead of bees or butterflies. The smell attracts the bugs they need.