Parasitic plants are notorious agricultural pests that drain nutrients from crops and cause economic losses of more than USD ...

Some plants bend the rules of plant life so far that they barely resemble plants at all. Balanophora is one of them - a ...

“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” Kenji Suetsugu, a botanist at Kobe University in Japan, said in a statement. “For many years I have been fascinated by plants ...

Have you seen that orange thread-like stuff draped over the top of plants in a salt marsh? It’s a parasitic annual plant called dodder, Cuscuta species. Dodder is capable of photosynthesis, but it ...

At the base of mossy trees, deep in the mountains of Taiwan and mainland Japan or nestled in the subtropical forests of Okinawa, grows what most might mistake for a mushroom—but it is actually a very ...

Strigolactones are a class of carotenoid‐derived phytohormones that play a pivotal role in regulating plant architecture and mediating interactions with both symbiotic organisms and parasitic plants.

In the damp understory of forests in Taiwan, mainland Japan, and Okinawa, a plant called Balanophora can fool you at first ...

A macro photograph of a cluster of mushroom-like plants on the forest floor against a mossy backdrop. These are Balanophora fungosa ssp. fungosa from southern Okinawa Island. At the base of mossy ...

A plant that looks like a fungus, lives like a parasite, and clones itself in the dark—Balanophora may be one of evolution’s ...

Northern root knot nematode worms (colored) attacking bean roots. Root knot nematodes are major agricultural pests attacking a wide variety of plants including major crops. A new study of the ...

Parasitic plants cause losses of over a billion dollars in crop losses each year, yet they rarely attack their own roots.