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

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

“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 ...

Balanophora plants represent an extreme example of this shift. They do not produce their own food through photosynthesis but ...

A weird-looking parasitic plant has discarded all its photosynthesis machinery – and nevertheless has found a way to thrive.

Balanophora shed one third of its genes as it evolved into a very streamlined parasitic plant. Balanophora is a parasitic plant found in tropical and temperate regions in Asia and tropical Africa and ...

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 ...

While most plants form a symbiotic partnership with mycorrhizal fungi, the fairy lantern is a mycohetertroph which manages to ...

New species of the plants are still being discovered, and their parasitic biology is being probed for potential cancer ...