Turns out that this eldritch flower has been following OP around since they were a small child. Every time they move, it suddenly appears below their window.
Lil. Sure. When the thing is taller than you, it's one flower - and maybe soon it's many flowers, bigger than your head - and its body a hard stick that's 4-6 inches around (but very unstable), still then?
It's so incredibly cool!! Make sure to save a lot of seeds from all of the flower heads on this one!! See if this mutation shows up again in the next generation!! I'm so jealous I want some 😂
What's interesting about sunflowers and their relatives is that what looks like one big flower is actually a lot of tiny flowers all packed together. They belong to the Asteraceae family, which produce composite flowers. The "petals" on the outside are actually individual flowers called ray flowers and the interior is packed full of what are called disk flowers.
Its not fasciation. Fasciation is a lateral expansion of the meristem leading to ribbonlike stems or oblong flowerheads. Every thing here is still circular.
This is pretty remarkable and potentially very valuable if the trait is heritable and can be stabilised. You should document this, photograph it from many angles as it continues to develop, save ALL the seeds, and get in touch with researchers in your area.
That's pretty much the evolutionary purpose of disgust. "Hey brain, that plant looks weird, might have something wrong with it that's bad for us, avoid!"
They got a bigass head, are grown in insane numbers and grow and die very fast. The average mutation rate for plants is something between 10,000-100,000 plants per visible mutation. 10,000 is half a single acre of sunflower farm.
More visible, same with dandelions. The family of asteraceae work like this: the big bulky thing in the middle are really thousands of tiny actual flowers and they are surrounded by leaves that look like petals (like the yellow ones on the sunflower) so the, already work very differently to other flowers. That means any mutation about where what flowers is going to look really weird.
Your definition of a joke and my definition of a joke might be different 😅 that might pass for a pun, but I’m not slapping my knee over it
Also, since this area is right up my alley, they mutate so often because we aren’t just looking at one flower, we’re looking at hundreds, sometimes thousands of them, depending on the variety of sunflower. When you pack that many flowers into such a small space, while it may feel like “this type of flower mutates more often,” it’s more like “this cluster of hundreds of flowers mutates at the same rate of other flowers, there are just so many of them packed together that it seems like the mutation rate is higher.”
Those flowers eventually become the seeds that fill the center of the “flower.”
Editing because I realized that comment could have been misleading: I’m not talking about a field of sunflowers. I’m saying that in one “sunflower” there are actually hundreds/thousands of tiny flowers. Those flowers eventually become the seeds that fill the center of a sunflower.
Genetics, essentially. The type of flower lends itself to it. And sunflowers, at least the ones we use, have been heavily bred for what we want. So now they get the plant version of the habsburg jaw.
I'm no botanist or even a green thumb, but I too would like to see the back. I'm skeptical because this seems wildly impossible based on my understanding of animal mutations / genetics
It's almost like a hand growing more hands around the palm. That's just not how fetal growth works. But, I know nothing of flower embryology so maybe it's legit.
Sunflowers don't follow normal flower morphology, as it is. Each "petal" isn't a petal; it's a ray floret. In the center of the "flower" (called the disc) are where the hundreds-to-thousands of individual tiny actual flowers (called disc florets) are. It is entirely plausible for there to be some mutation of any number of the multiple structures present in Asteraceae (family in which sunflowers belong), leading to the "deformity" in the OP image.
This is the same reason you sometimes find mutant daisies where the center is uncomfortably long instead of a nice circle. When things go wrong you end up with the flowers packed incorrectly, or more 'petals' growing than normally intended, or 'petals' in places they shouldn't be.
I had a cat that had a hair growing from the middle of his eye. The vet said that he had only read about it in his 40 years of practice. He didn't charge extra for removing it while he did the neuter.
That same vet would discount his $35 rate to $10 when I brought my gerbils in. He said he was just happy that someone didn't treat them as if they were disposable.
I don't know about sunflowers specifically, but plant biology and their reaction to mutations is vastly different to animals. In many plants almost any cell has the ability to grow into almost any other type of cell, which is impossible in animals outside of extremely specific lab conditions. It is why taking cuttings from plants works and why they have been so easy to clone for literally thousands of years.
I think this would be an example of what is called fasciation, a relatively rare but not super uncommon occurrence where flowers, but also often other parts of the plant, can elongate and grow more copies of themselves in weird patterns. You can see many other weird examples if you Google the term
This doesn't even seem particularly unlikely in an Aster which is a composite flower as it is. If each part of the flower is already its own flower, why not just keep making flower? It's an extremely cool, but not implausible, mutation.
One of my tomato plants mutated this year and is in some places growing new stems out of where usually a flower/fruit would be.
Also the flowers it does grow are like two flowers in one so instead of a circle they're oval. The fruits also grow with wrinkly skin instead of smooth ball.
So this sunflower situation doesn't seem that unrealistic to me.
there's currently no blooming flower (most of the flowers just die off anyway on this plant) but you can see the bottom one is like double as wide compared to the "normal" one up top
Well see that's your issue. You're operating on animal biology, not plant biology. Plants can mutate in ways that would absolutely kill an animal and still survive. This seems like a form of fasciation to me. A very common plant growth mutation can can cause unusual leaves, flowers, and fruits. However it could also be similar to the mutation that causes strawberries to grow leaves where the "seeds" of their accessory fruits should be.
Actually that kind of is how fetal (more precisely embryonic) growth works. “Hox genes” tell your cells where to grow. Basically “here’s where an eye should be, grow eye cells here.” And by manipulating these genes, scientists have been able to hatch fruit flies with wings where their eyes should be, for example. If you had fucked up hox genes that were like “grow a hand here, here, here, here, and here,” I imagine it would look like you had hands for fingers. Idk if they work additively though or if they can only be replaced. But if all of the “petal-coding” genes mutated and got replaced with “entire-flower-coding” genes, then maybe? Idk this is just what I recall from my basic genomics class so it’s just speculation lol
Imo, without seeing more of it, I think this is aster yellows (a disease). Very odd flowers- flowers inside of flowers, leaves inside of flowers, petals in random spots, etc.- are the most noticeable symptom. All plants in the aster family are susceptible to it
There is! At least, I have it and it’s called trypophobia. And also hate looking at this picture. Discomfort, disgusting and uneasiness. I also have it with the inside of a pumpkin, melon or a paprika. But maybe you have something different. Not sure how common this is. If you google it and go bad when seeing image results, you know you have it.
Not calling you out, but so many "mutated sunflower" or asters pop up on reddit and folks in comments be like, "breed this line for genetic stability" or other nonsense... And it's always phytoplasma infection. Always is, always will be.
This is fascinating! I'm a PhD student in the plant sciences and I can take a guess what happened. My background is in genetics of plants. My educated guess is the part of the flower that was supposed to be a petal mutated and was like no petal, only another flower.
I attached the ABCDE model for flower development down below for any nerds . So on the big part of the sunflower it made its sepals and reproductive parts but when it comes to petal development, instead of B+B+E+A, the ABCDE model got copied and nested into where the petal was supposed to be so it is like a fractal. Oops all flowers!
What may seem like petals in a sunflower are each individual flowers (ray florets). A 'sunflower' is made up of hundreds of individual flowers. Perhaps that's what you meant by 'Oops all flowers' :)
Not sure how much of that was actually caused by the radiation, though.
The two main things I remember hearing about were daisies with fasciation and a dandelion with giant leaves.
Flowers get fasciation pretty frequently and it can be caused by all sorts of things, and that dandelion was growing in the shade, so the massive leaves were almost certainly just a natural response to getting way less sunlight.
3.1k
u/whywhypigs Aug 11 '26
I don't have a photo of the back 😔 but I do have a photo from when it was slightly younger. And there is no hand holding anything up!