Some plants just bloom so rarely even though thats an important part of their lifecycle ( every plant that blooms reproduces like that?).
So for me it seems odd that some plants don‘t try to maximize the number of times they do this.
Dessert cacti make sense to me since they want to try when the conditions are just right and not waste precious energy, but thats not every plant that rarely blooms.
So why do some plants bloom so rarely ?
In: Biology
Plants need to gather a lot of energy and nutrients to make flowers, fruits and seeds. If a species lives in conditions where storing those things is hard, it will take a very long time to get ready. This is why some cactuses take decades between blooms. Other plants, like the corpse flower, are in rainforests where nutrients are common but so is competition. Spending ten years to store up enormous amounts of building materials and then creating one huge flowering stalk that reeks of death and is irrestible to carrion insects and can overwhelm the competition for a few days is the survival strategy they evolved for. And since it works, they dont evolve something else.
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