This photo shows a marine animal, not a flower

This article is more than one year old.
Published on July 31, 2019 at 05:00
3 min read
By AFP Indonesia

Numerous Facebook posts have shared a photo they claim show the rare blooming of a flower on the Jayawijaya Mountains in Indonesia’s region of Papua. The claim is false; the picture actually shows a marine animal called a sea pen.

The image appeared on this June 25, 2019, post on Facebook and has been shared more than 3,700 times since.

Below is a screenshot of the post:

A screenshot of the Facebook post

The photo’s Indonesian-language caption translates as:

“THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD !!!!
MEGAPUSPA flower is blooming on the summit of the Jayawijaya Mountains, Papua (there is the only one in the world, in Papua). It only blooms once in 33 years. A perfect bloom happened at 2:30pm Indonesian eastern time today. INDONESIA”.

The Jayawijaya Mountains are located in Indonesia’s province of Papua. Trikora Peak is the range’s highest point, reaching 4,750 metres (15,580 feet), according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The photo was also shared here, here, and here on Facebook with similar, misleading claims in late June 2019.

The same photograph has also been misrepresented in Indonesian-language Facebook posts from 2016, like here, here and here, which claim it shows a flower called nagapuspa that bloomed in the Jayawijaya Mountains.

A search on Facebook found the photo has also been circulating with a similar claim since 2016, for example here, where the “flower” is referred to as a “Nagapuspa”.

A Google image search found the same photo has circulated online since at least 2015 with claims it shows a rare “Nagapushpa” flower in the Himalayas. American fact-check outlet Snopes debunked that claim on January 25, 2016.

The Snopes report said: “This photograph does not depict any type of flower or plant; it was taken in 2013 by Gordon J. Bowbrick, who identified the pictured creature as a sea pen, a marine invertebrate known as an anthozoan.”

A link included in the article to Bowbrick’s original image on photo.net is no longer accessible, but was archived here on July 20, 2013.

Below is a screenshot of the archived page:

A screenshot of the archived photo.net page

Below is a comparison of the photo in the misleading post (L) and the photo in the archived link (R):

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, a sea pen is “any of the 300 species of the order Pennatulacea, colonial invertebrate marine animals of the class Anthozoa (phylum Cnidaria). The name sea pen derives from their resemblance to quill pens. They occur in shallow and deep waters from polar seas to the tropics.”

Dwi Suprapti, WWF Indonesia’s marine species conservation coordinator, told AFP in an interview that the image does indeed show a sea pen.

The nagapushpa does exist, but it is an evergreen tree in the Himalayas.

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