Sumatran stories: Titan Arum

As we embark on the CFZ Sumatra Expedition, we have lined up a series of themed posts during our absence.

Pictured above is the CFZ's Richard Freeman (right) with a freaky-looking and rarely blooming Sumatran plant known as the Titan Arum, or ‘corpse flower’, which grows to the amazing height of 2-3 feet.

As well as being the world’s biggest flowering plant, it is also the smelliest as it goes into the final phase of its six-year life when it gives off a pungent odour, reminiscent of rotting flesh.

The plant is a distant relative of the ‘lords and ladies’, a British lily. It is distinguished by its yellowy, fleshy spike known as a spadix. This is wrapped in a single cream leaf which, when opened, reveals a rich crimson inside.

When the plant is ready to attract pollinators, the spike heats up and gives off the smell which disgusts humans but is very attractive to insects. Hence it's nickname 'corpse flower'. It then develops the fruit which attracts birds.

Recounting his 2004 trip to Sumatra, Richard wrote this rather poetic description of the beastly bloom for the Fortean Times:

"By a remarkable stroke of luck, a specimen of the Titan arum, the world’s largest flower (below), and one that blossoms only once every 10 years, was blooming nearby – an unmissable opportunity.

The village backed onto an area called "the garden", cultivated land that is used for growing crops but which merges with the jungle seamlessly and is, in some areas, very overgrown. Due to the garden’s more open nature, one usually encounters more wildlife here than in the jungle proper, and this is where the T. arum was to be found.

It lived up to its name; it is truly the Godzilla of flowers, looking like some strange surrealist sculpture or something made by the BBC special effects department. It stood 7ft (2m) tall, the elephant’s foot of a stem widening into a barrel-sized green bowl. This in turn flared out into the petal, which looked like nothing so much as a Spanish Flamenco dancer’s red dress. Finally, a phallic stamen of bright yellow stabbed upwards from within the petal’s folds.

The scent of the T. arum is said to be like rotting flesh; it is pollinated by flies attracted to what they assume is a cadaver. We could detect no such smell around our flower – but close by the fresh carcass of a bearded pig was stealing its thunder."

From the archives: The Ozenkadnook Tiger (1964)

A BIG thank you to our supporters...

We'd be remiss if we failed to mention three very important people who have kicked in to help us on our Sumatra expedition.


David Hearder and Joy Williams have generously supported the purchase of game cameras for the expedition, and I hope for their sake and ours we capture something of interest on what has become a staple part of every 21st century cryptozoological adventurer's toolkit.

And a big thank you to our good friend and author Paul Cropper, who has supplied us with some quite spectacular kit to ensure we don't get Typhoid or any other waterborne nasties, and have a hotline to the modern-day equivalent of the Thunderbirds should we hit a patch of strife.

Thank you to David, Joy and Paul, and also to anyone else who has purchased a CFZ t-shirt, kicked in some dollars for a game camera or visited one of our sponsors through this page. It all helps!

Stay tuned for updates...

Sumatran Stories: The Orang Pendek

As we slog through the jungles of Sumatra, we've lined up some posts to keep you entertained. This latest one profiles our quarry, the legendary Orang Pendek, the man-ape of Sumatra.

Deep in the Kerinci region of Sumatra, a creature is said to exist that has a lot in common with apes - and humans. The so-called Orang Pendek (literally meaning 'short man' in the native tongue) is a ground-dwelling bipedal ape about three feet tall. It also leaves behind a somewhat unusual footprint, as seen below compared to several others.

The animal has allegedly been seen and documented for at least one hundred years by forest tribes, local villagers, Dutch colonists, and Western scientists and travelers. 

But what is it? This 1932 newspaper article describes an encounter with the creature (skip to the second half):

And another article details a startling discovery:

Curiouser and curiouser!

Of crows and yowies...

Newcastle Herald columnist Jeff Corbett dips into the Yowie well again in his latest column...

"He is a beef farmer in a valley about 20 kilometres west of Kempsey, and Ron Clarke was with his sister, now Joan Delforce of Wallsend, and other brothers and sisters 50 years ago when they saw yowies many times on their family dairy farm not far from Ron's beef farm today. They describe them as covered in dark brown to black hair, with long hair around the neck, about the height of a tall man, bear like, and sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four.

Last December, after I wrote of yowies and an Elermore Vale couple's sighting of a yowie, Joan told me how she and her family members had seen yowies alone and in family groups many times around their dairy farm.

Late last week Ron told me how he had woken before sunrise one morning when he was 14 to find an adult yowie in his room, and that it stayed there for some little time until his father's alarm clock burst into life at 4.30, when it went hurrying off. Ron's father, by the way, had refused to believe his children until he had his own encounter with a yowie.

The Kempsey area has been a hotspot for yowie sightings, according to the definitive yowie book, The Yowie - In Search of Australia's Bigfoot, by Tony Healy and Paul Cropper."

Metamodel confirms Thylacine's killers

Over at the Environment Institute blog hosted by the University of Adelaide, guest blogger and postdoctoral fellow Thomas Prowse discusses the use of software models to explore the roots of extinction:

"At a time of accelerated species loss, it is concerning that past extinctions are still so poorly understood. Australia has a woeful record of mammal extinctions, having lost 18 mammal species over the last 200 years. The specific causes of these extinctions are unclear and, in particular, the relative importance of introduced predators (foxes, cats), herbivores (sheep, cattle) and infectious disease, is hotly debated. The popular ‘disease hypothesis’ attributes most extinctions to epidemics initiating from European domestic animals and livestock. This hypothesis lacks hard evidence but human history provides a bleak analogue – just think of the indigenous Americans who lost up to 95 % of their population to disease epidemics after European contact.

Given many Australian mammal populations are currently declining (even without extensive habitat loss), it is critically important to investigate the reasons for these historical extinctions. We in the Global Ecology Laboratory are collaborating with an international team of conservation scientists to develop new software for studying extinction processes and predicting the extinction risk of threatened species. A key collaborator is Dr Robert Lacy (Chicago Zoological Society) who developed Vortex, a software package designed for population viability analysis (PVA) that has been used extensively over the last two decades for conservation assessment and planning. Our goal is to develop a flexible framework to allow multiple Vortex models to be integrated within a single ‘metamodel’, thereby extending the applicability of PVA techniques to incorporate complex multi-species systems. We have recently completed the first case study using this approach.

The extinction of the carnivorous, marsupial thylacine (aka “Tasmanian Tiger”) proved an ideal case study because, while difficult to explain by single factors, we know that the species was confronted with multiple extinction drivers. Prior to European settlement in 1803, thylacines were broadly distributed throughout most of Tasmania. In 1886, however, the Tasmanian government legislated a bounty payment for thylacines, paying bounties for 2 184 thylacine carcasses until the scheme’s termination in 1909. Only a handful of animals were located after the bounty was lifted and, in 1933, the last known thylacine was captured from the wild.

It has been argued repeatedly that European impacts (i.e., habitat loss, bounty hunting) were not sufficiently severe to account for the thylacine extinction. Furthermore, government bounty records indicate a sudden reduction in thylacine kills after 1905 which, it has been argued, is evidence of a rapid population decline most likely caused by disease. Therefore, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists disease as one cause of the thylacine extinction.

However, bounty hunting clearly interacted with many other European-imposed pressures that together might account for the thylacine’s extinction, without the need to invoke disease. The negative impact of European settlers on the thylacine’s prey base (kangaroos and wallabies) was probably very important. European settlers hunted kangaroos and wallabies for food and the fur trade and also introduced non-native herbivores (particularly sheep) to their favourite habitats.

To investigate the causes of the thylacine extinction, we linked multiple Vortex models dynamically to develop a stable predator-herbivore-vegetation metamodel representing the pre-European food web. We then perturbed this metamodel to simulate the diverse impacts of Europeans, including habitat modification, bounty hunting, prey harvesting, and the rapid growth of the sheep population that competed with kangaroos and wallabies for food. We were able to simulate the thylacine extinction over a wide range of plausible initial population sizes (without needing to invoke disease) and also recreated the rapid, early 1900s population decline. The metamodel identified competition between introduced sheep and the thylacine’s prey as a critical extinction driver.

We concluded that the thylacine’s demise can be accounted by known negative European impacts. The interacting effects of these impacts were powerful enough that, even without a disease epidemic, European activities committed this species to extinction. Our continuing work to develop a platform for complex systems models will be of great use for the study of historical extinctions and current conservation problems involving complex, interacting stressors."

CFZ Sumatra Expedition 2011 kicks off!

Bags have been packed and flights caught. We rendezvous with our British colleagues within the next 24 hours and head off into the jungle.

Will we find the Orang Pendek, or evidence of the elusive creature? 

Stay tuned!

Buy the CFZ Sumatra Expedition tee!

Don't fancy visiting a jungle infested with disease-carrying mosquitoes, man-eating tigers, poisonous snakes and spiders, or cryptids that don't want to be found?

Then why not stay glued to our blog for the updates - and wear a t-shirt that will get your friends talking.

You can support this and future CFZ expeditions by purchasing a t-shirt.

And if you buy one and wear it, we'll happily post a picture of you supporting the CFZ on this very blog!

Devil's Advocates take top prize

A group of Australian scientists known as the Devils' Advocates have taken out a prestigious Eureka prize for their work to prevent the extinction of the Tasmanian devil.

University of Tasmania zoologist Menna Jones, Menzies Research Institute associate professor Greg Woods and Anne Maree Pearse from the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program were part of a team of five awarded the $10,000 Sherman Eureka Prize for environmental research.

Dr Jones said the most important part of the award was highlighting the plight of the devils and the work needed to save them from potential extinction.

She said the team had earmarked the prizemoney to be put directly back into the research.

Professor Hamish McCallum of Griffith University and associate professor Kathy Belov from the University of Sydney also were part of the devil research team.

Threatened Species Day a sober reminder

Quolls are high on the endangered list and could afce the same fate as the Tasmanian Tiger, wildlife groups believe.

Like the thylacine, the endangered spot-tailed quoll is a meat-eating marsupial. So plans to drop bait from planes over vast tracts of land in Victoria to wipe out wild dogs threaten the little creature's existence.

There are just a few hundred of the cat-sized creatures left.

"A 7kg spot-tailed quoll that picks up bait poisoned at a strength to kill a 40kg dog will go the way of its eastern quoll cousins, which are now extinct on the Australian mainland," said Jill Redwood, spokeswoman for Environment East Gippsland.

Ms Redwood urged the Victorian Government to reconsider baiting.

But Agriculture Minister Peter Walsh said baiting would be carried out.

About 5000ha of inaccessible land is expected to be included in the initial baiting.


Down in Tasmania, the Minister for Environment, Parks and Heritage, Brian Wightman, has urged Tasmanians to consider the lessons of the past on Threatened Species Day and learn how they can help protect the State’s biodiversity.

Mr Wightman said the annual Threatened Species Day, held on 7 September, is particularly significant this year because it marks 75 years since the death of the last known Tasmanian Tiger.

“The death of the Thylacine in the old Hobart Zoo in 1936 is a symbol of what we have lost and of the importance of doing all we can to help those species now under threat,” he said.

“The protection and conservation of our threatened species isn’t something that ‘someone else’ will look after – we all have a role.

“We can all be aware of what is on our land and how best to look after it.

“Building, vegetation clearing and gardening - all of these activities can affect threatened species. But if we know what lives on our land and what it needs we can really make a difference.”

Mr Wightman said taking care on the roads and disposing of rubbish correctly were also examples of things individuals could do every day to help out.