Random plant event: special Dieffenbachia flowering

I've posted pictures of Dieffenbachia flowers before, but nothing quite like these. Previously, for whatever reason, the flowers never actually fully developed. This might have been because the conditions weren't right for it, or it could have been because the plants in question never intended for them to develop all the way in the first place. Really don't know.

So when one of mine at home, a NOID that I've had for about three and a half years now, started to produce flowers a while ago, I wasn't really all that interested. Been there, done that.

Then the plant started doing something brand-new, that I've never seen a Dieffenbachia do before: it looked like it was putting two flowers together, one on top of the other, with a narrower "waist" in between. I pinched the bottom one a few times, just to try to figure out what was going on in there, and it was actually mostly hollow, just a stem inside a big balloon of a spathe.

And but then it got weirder, because the top section worked itself free, and then lower "flower" opened up:


And I was like, ooooooh. I've heard about this.

'Cause you see, when you look up Dieffenbachia or Philodendron or whatever -- aroids -- there will usually be something in there about how the flower spike usually contains both male and female flowers, which are separated spatially. Male on top, female on bottom, with a zone of sterile flowers in between. Previously, I'd always seen inflorescences like the one below (taken from a previous post):



and I'd assumed that when I looked at the white part at the top, I was in fact looking both the male and female flowers, with a zone between the two of sterile flowers, and it just happened that male, female, and sterile all looked identical. And whatever the hell the yellowy stuff below that was, it wasn't really relevant: some kind of misdeveloped flowers, perhaps.

But no. It turns out that two things were happening. One, I was oblivious to anything that was going on inside the spathe, and two, I never happened to be paying attention when the action was happening.

Oh yes. There is action.

Here is the part I'd always assumed was the whole "flower," the male part. It had, at this point, just emerged from the spathe:


And the following day, it was doing this:


That lasted no more than a day, after which the spathe popped back up around the spadix and sealed it back in again.

Meanwhile, the female part, which you can just barely see in that first picture, was doing stuff as well. It's much harder to photograph, because I have to hold the spathe open with one hand while I take the picture with the other, and so the quality is kind of crappy here, but you get the gist. The basic structure is clearly visible in the first picture:


And then the coloring is more true to life in the second:


This is also a very quick process. The next day, the colors and textures had changed:


And then it sealed itself back up again as well.

In nature, my understanding is that beetles pollinate these flowers. The plant attracts the beetles, the beetles crawl into the chamber around the female flowers (hence the need for a lot of space around them: the plant's making room for the beetles), and then . . . magic happens?, and the flower is pollinated. No account of the process I've read so far explains how or why the beetles pick up the pollen from the male flowers in the first place (they're not self-fertile, so it'd have to be coming from another flower), or how the beetles get back out after the deed is done (the seal on the spathe is tight, actually: I found it difficult to open up to try to look at the male flowers again), or what they do while they're in there. But at least the male-female-sterile part makes more sense now. I'm a little bit amazed that I hadn't run into pictures of this stuff before, and I'm a lot amazed that my plant decided to do this while growing inside: clearly it's adequate, but I would never have thought this was the ideal environment for growing and flowering.