Biology

SALT LAKE CITY - The famed "corpse flower" plant - known for its giant size, rotten-meat odor and phallic shape - has a new, smaller relative: A University of Utah botanist discovered a new species of Amorphophallus that is one-fourth as tall but just as stinky.

The new species, collected on two small islands off Madagascar, brings to about 170 the number of species in the genus Amorphophallus, which is Greek for "misshapen penis" because of the shape of the plants' flower-covered shaft, called the inflorescence or the spadix, says Greg Wahlert, a postdoctoral researcher in biology.

In 1991, when Marlene Zuk visited Hawaii, she did what every visitor to the islands wants to do.

"I said, 'I'll see if there are any crickets there that I can dissect for parasites,' " she said. "Doesn't everyone?"

Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, studies crickets along with some other animals. She recently published "Sex on Six Legs," her third book about the sex lives, and other interesting behaviors, of insects.

The book details intriguing elements of the bug world, such as how the genitals of male honeybees explode after they have sex, how mother earwigs care for and feed their young, and how a particular female wasp poisons the brain of a cockroach just enough so that she can use its antennae to steer it to her nest, where it becomes food for her brood.