Crowds lined up Wednesday to see - and smell - the rare blooming of an endangered tropical flower that releases a pungent odor when it opens once every several years. The corpse flower began blooming Tuesday afternoon at the California Academy of Sciences, a research institution and science museum in San Francisco. The flower, also known as amorphophallus titanum, only blooms for one to three days once every seven to ten years. During the bloom it releases a powerful smell described by some as rotting food or sweaty socks. "It's kind of imitating the smell of kind of a dead carcass to kind of get all the flies to come and interact with it, pick up pollen, and then take that pollen to another flower that it might investigate due to its smell," said Lauren Greig, a horticulturalist, California Academy of Sciences. It was the first bloom for the flower known as Mirage, which was donated to the California Academy of Sciences in 2017. It's been housed in the museum's rainforest exhibit since 2020. The corpse flower, which is native to the Indonesia island of Sumatra, is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with only less than 1,000 individual plants left in the wild.