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 ...

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

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

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 ...

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

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 ...

The Christmas holiday season would not be complete without a dangling of mistletoe under the doorway. Traditionally, mistletoe is used to decorate the doorway, leading visitors inside to beautiful ...

In Old Norse mythology, Baldr, the son of the god Odin and the goddess Frigg, was slain with a mistletoe spear. Some ...