Scientists Found a Plant That Gave Up on Photosynthesis Entirely

Scientists Found a Plant That Gave Up on Photosynthesis Entirely

For most plants, there is no way to eat and live without photosynthesis. Sure, some, like the Venus flytrap, find more carnivorous ways of sustaining themselves. But there’s a weird group of parasitic plants out there called Balanophora that found a loophole in it all by thriving without the need for photosynthesis, instead relying on being parasitic little moochers. A new genetic analysis of seven Balanophora species, published in New Phytologi…

Strange parasitic ‘mushroom’ plant abandoned photosynthesis and somehow flourished

In the damp understory of forests in Taiwan, mainland Japan, and Okinawa, a plant called Balanophora can fool you at first glance. Its knobby flower stalks look more like a mushroom than a flowering plant. Yet it is a plant, and a deeply unusual one: it lives almost entirely underground, fused to a host’s roots and drawing everything it needs from that host. That strange lifestyle is at the center of a new genetic survey led by researchers from …