How do flowers get their smells?

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“I like to try and wiggle mine, but one of it knows is most important jobs, is to smell stuff.”

Maybe that's why noises love noises.

Roses are actually one of the most complex smell mixtures we know of. Some studies, by scientists like me, have shown that roses can make up to 200 different smell chemicals in their smell. Roses and other flowers aren't pumping out those pretty perfumes for us, though. It's for bugs and birds.

And some flowers make a stink so strong, I'll make you wish you notice any off-button. Flowers and the signs of their sense, coming up. Hey, do you mind grabbing that bag of trash? Thanks. It's my turn to take out the trash.

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Thank you. Hey, Mark. I saved a cobweb up there for ya. Wanna go put on the suction shoes and go get it? Oh, yeah, buddy. Thank you. You are listening to brainson. Part of the brainson universe.

I'm Molly Bloom and my co-host today is Isla from Melbourne, Australia. Hi, Isla. Happy to be here, Molly. Today, we're answering these questions about flowers. My name is Elise from San Diego, California.

My name is Griffin from Santa Rosa, California. My name is David from St. Louis, Missouri. My question is how do flowers make their smell? How and why do flowers smell? How do flowers get their smell?

Are there lots of flowers where you live? Yeah, Melbourne has lots of flowers. Oh, fun. Do you have a favorite flower? My favorite flower is probably one of the native flowers called a Benxia. Kinda looks like a porcupine.

Oh, I want to see that flower.

“So is there a flower that you feel like kind of represents you?”

Or like, it's kind of you feel like a kinship with? I think it may be a sunflower because it's my favorite color. And it's bright like me. Oh, I love that. So besides flowers, what are some of your other favorite smells?

Probably chocolate, dinner, and I have a coconut perfume that I like. Hmm, and how about some of your least favorite smells? Dad's socks. Stinky socks. Yeah, no one likes that.

Do you feel like your dad's are stinky or the other socks yourself? Yeah. So do you have a favorite flower smell?

Hmm, they cost us a lot of really nice.

Yeah, they do. I put a new one in my room every week. Oh, that's so nice. I think my favorite is probably lilac. They bloom here for only a very short amount of time, but when they do, it's very, very wonderful.

Flower aroma is a terrific topic. To get started, let's review some flower basics. Flowers are a part of mini plants.

“And aside from looking great and smelling great, flowers have a super important job.”

Flowers are how these plants make more of themselves. The flowers will eventually make seeds that will grow into new flowers, but for a flower to make these seeds, it needs to be polished. Then, both you guessed it, Colin, that powdery stuff inside flowers. To make seeds, that pollen usually needs to be moved from one flower to another flower of the same kind.

Sort of like moving a key from your pocket to a lock.

When the key and lock finally meet, it opens a door.

For our flower, the pollen is like the key. In the middle of a flower is a part called the stigma. That's like the lock. When pollen from one flower makes it to the stingner of another flower, it looks a process in making seeds.

But the pollen and the stigma have to be from the same type of flower. Pollen from a rose, for instance, can't pollinate a daysy.

“Yeah, that's like having the wrong key from the wrong lock.”

So, what helps move all that pollen around? Most of the time, it's animals called pollinators. Let's meet them. ♪ ♪ Pollinators are animals that visit flowers. They're usually looking for nectar or pollen they can eat.

While they're, they get pollen on their bodies. Then they carry a pollen with them when they visit next flower. Pollination accomplished. The most common pollinators are bees, flies, butterflies, and moths. But other animals can do it too.

Like ants, bats, birds, lizards, and even small virgins. Some flowers can pollinate themselves. And even a strong breeze or water can move pollen around. But for the most part, this important work is done. By tiny creatures all over the planet, working day and night.

Thanks, pollinators. ♪ ♪ Since pollinators are so important, flowers have developed all kinds of ways to get them to come visit. Sometimes they attract pollinators by looking exciting.

But a lot of the time they use smells.

So smell is basically little bits of chemicals floating around in the atmosphere around us.

That's Dr. Kelsey Byers. She studies flowers and their smells at the John in his center in the United Kingdom. ♪ ♪ So when you breathe in that air into your lungs, and it travels over your nose, you can imagine breathing in all those little particles of smell or floating around in the air and they're going to start to your nose.

So flowers smells are just really small bits of chemicals released by flowers. And those chemicals are in the air, animals can sense them. We sense them through our noses. Kelsey says flowers often make this chemical smells in the petals themselves. But sometimes the smell can also come from the leaves, feed ever smelled herbs or spices, for example.

Or it can come from the nectar, which is what the plants use to feed their pollinators like bees. So it can come from any part of the plant, but most often it's coming from the petals. Wild, Mr. Euler, it turns out scientists don't know exactly how most flowers release these smells. Are they tiny openings on the petal?

“Or do the smells evaporate out? Does it spray like perfume?”

Maybe one of you listening will figure it out. Sound flowers have simplest methods made up of just a few chemicals. But not roses. Rose's are actually one of the most complex smell mixtures we know of. Some studies by scientists like me have shown that roses can make up to 200 different smell chemicals in their smell.

And we call that a bouquet. Just like a bouquet of flowers is not just the individual flowers, but that whole beautiful bouquet you hold. A smell bouquet is not just the individual smell chemicals, but the whole picture of all of them together. And our brains actually process those, not just by going, well that one's this smell and that one's this smell, but they actually mix together to create a unique picture in our brain of what a rose smells like.

We'll explain in a minute, but first, another wild mystery alert.

It's the... I don't know. Are you ready for the mystery sound? Yes. Wonderful.

Here it is. Hmm, what do you think? Maybe it kind of sounds like someone scraping a copper or something. I think maybe cleaning something. Very good.

Do you want to hear it again? Yeah.

“Okay, so you thought cleaning, what's another thought?”

Maybe brushing something.

Maybe metal. Ooh, nice. It's a brush. Very good. Okay, well here's a mystery sound again.

Get another chance to guess and hear the answer after the credits. So, stick around. We're working on an episode about the science of baseball, and if you've ever been to a game, you know there are some great chance, like win twins. But you know what doesn't have a lot of chance?

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That's also when you can send questions, mystery sounds, drawings, so tell us your favorite science, themed junk. Again, that's braidson.org/contact. We can't wait to hear it for you. Welcome back.

This is Brainson, and I'm Molly. And I'm Aile. And we just learned how flowers get their smells. It's chemicals. Flowers make special chemicals and release them into the air.

The goal is to lure in pollinators. So the full flowers are pretty much trying to do the same thing. Why do different flowers have different sense? Here's flower smell researcher, Kelsey Bier's again. So different flowers have different smells because the smells are serving different purposes.

“So, for example, say that you want to attract of honeybee.”

And you want the honeybee to come and move your pollen from one flower to another flower. Ideally, you would smell like something that smells good to a honeybee. But let's say, you're a type of flower that's best pollinated by a moth. Then you'd want to smell good to moths. Some flowers make smells that lots of pollinators like dandy lines for example.

But some flowers want very specific pollinators to visit. Like orchids that can only be pollinated by a certain type of wasp. Those orchids will make a smell that's really only attractive to that wasp. So flowers make different smells to attract different pollinators cool stuff. But it gets even cooler because flowers can also change their smell over time.

Here's Kelsey. So one of the biggest changes that we've noticed is that many flowers change their smell after they've been pollinated. So after an insect has come to visit them to move pollen around. And some of the idea that we think behind this is that if you've already got enough pollen to make seeds, there's no point in having it insect visit you anymore.

From the plants point of view. There's even some flowers that will start smelling bad to pollinators after they've been pollinated. So they go from a smell that says, Yeah, yeah, come over here. To one that says,

Ew, go away, leave me alone. That way, if a fly will be comes by, they won't pollinate you to flower that's already pollinated. They're more likely to keep looking for a flower that hasn't been pollinated yet and still smells good. That helps more flowers get pollinated. So clever, well done flowers.

Thank you. Let's take a quick break and check out the mail bag. This is where we dive into all the cool questions, drawings, and ideas you send our way. Oh, looks like we've got some more designs for new rooms and our brand headquarters.

If I think I knew a good one, John had color should be a robot with those robots that do different tests for you.

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Thanks! Well, come back.

Ila and I are talking about flower smells.

Those whiffs of air that are actually invisible messages made of chemicals. Flowers use these chemical messages to attract animals, and sometimes to drive them away. Speaking of driving away, who fly? Who? How did that fly again in the studio?

“Ish, that's a fly in my face! Help me get it away!”

Did someone call for help? He's hand in. Oh, what's that smell? It's me! I haven't showered in two weeks. I'm wearing clothes I got from the dumpster, and I gargled expired milk before I came over.

Um, why? So I can keep up with my team. Now team? Yeah.

Meet the super team I assembled.

We're called stink force. Stink force. To my left, captain skunked her pants. Is that a real skunk? Yep.

But I only stink when startled. Or when the world needs saving. To my right, we have Titan Aeroom. Code name, corpse flower. Hello.

Over here. The eight foot tall, big red flower. That's me. Hi. Wow, corpse flower.

I've had it these.

“They are real flowers that grow in jungles in the middle of a famous foul odor.”

Ma, you're making me blush. Together, we save the world using the power of stink. If a bad guy's robbing a bank, we put stink in that bank, and leave that thief gasping for fresh air.

If there's a cut, stuck in a tree. We stink so hard that cat takes one with and passes out. Then we catch it as it falls. Cat rescued. And if there's an old lady who needs help crossing the street,

we help her while smelling terrible. Stink force. Well, it worked. The fly left me alone and landed on the big corpse flower. Yeah.

Fly's love me. I smell like a rotting flesh. Limberger cheese. Garlic. All the dankest tanks.

Yeah, you sure do. Yeah, why exactly do you do that again? It's how I attract the right pollinators. You see, some flowers like to attract regular old pollinators. Like butterflies or birds.

But I specialize in attracting beetles and flies that like rotting meat. Yeah, it's kind of genius actually. The corpse flower grows in jungles and it can get really, really big. Yeah, it looks like a giant flower that's about as tall as scoop us.

Exactly. It takes a lot of work to grow that big. And it can take years for the flower to bloom too. And when they do bloom, it only lasts for like a day or two. So, a corpse flower needs to make sure that it can attract all the pollinators it can in a very short amount of time.

Yeah, that's why my stink is so strong. I want to lure in rotten, flesh-loving beetles and flies from all over.

That's serious stinkage. Oh, and get this.

Part of the flower even heats up during the bloom.

This helps waft out that scent. And it makes the flower seem more like a warm dead animal corpse. That's actually so clever and sneaky. Very. So a fly or beetle will come to the flower thinking they'll find a good place to lay their eggs.

So they're larva can eat the dead meat when they hatch. Yep, but instead, they find a flower. They pick up pollen, move it around, and hopefully pollinate a corpse flower, and help make more of these marvelous plants. They're a handful of other flowers that also use stink to attract pollinators. But in my opinion, the corpse flower is by far the coolest.

I agree. So cool. Yeah, you are a fascinating flower. What can I say? It's all thanks to my stinks.

“But speaking of stinks, do you think you could find someone else to help now?”

It's getting a little hard to breathe in here. Oh, of course. Come on, little fly. Let's leave these nice people alone. Great work team.

Another day saved by stink force.

stink force. Flower smells are just chemicals that a plant releases into the air. These smells help attract birds, bees, moss, and other animals. Those animals pick up pollen from one flower and help move it to another flower of the same kind. That gets off the process of making flower seeds.

So even more flowers can grow. That's it for this episode of Brain Zon. This episode was produced by me Molly Bloom, Mark Sanchez and Santa Totten. It was sound design by Mark Sanchez, who also wrote our theme music. We had engineering help from Derek Myers, special thanks to Tom Bryant,

Edeline and Celeste, and Fiona Clark. And special thanks to Ken Taborski at Code of the North for all of their website help. Okay. I'll let's hear that mystery sound one more time. Earlier you thought someone's sweeping something, maybe a brush on something, do you have new thoughts?

Not really. I think I might say with the same guess.

“Okay, I like your guess. Should we see what the answer is?”

Yes. All right, here is the answer. Hi, I'm Charlie, and I'm from Indiana, Jersey. That was the sound of the paint roller I'm doing not at all. Okay. I am giving you at least partial credit, maybe even full credit,

because a paint roller is essentially like a paint brush and you said brush. That was hard. That was really hard. Have you used a paint roller before? I'm not. Have you seen one, do you know what they look like?

Yeah, like the roller is with the long stick. Exactly. And there's like kind of like a spongey thing on the end that you roll on the wall. So it was like a sponge rolling paint on the wall. I think you did great. That was a hard one. Now it's time for the brains honor roll.

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