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 ...

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

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

If you happen to come across plants of the Balanophoraceae family in a corner of a forest, you might easily mistake them for fungi growing around tree roots. Their mushroom-like structures are ...

Most plants are autotrophs because they make their own food by photosynthesis. But for every rule there is an exception. Some plants are non-photosynthetic and parasitic, obtaining their food through ...

The Apodanthaceae are small parasitic plants living almost entirely inside other plants. They occur in Africa, Iran, Australia, and the New World. Bellot and Renner propose the first revision of the ...

Parasitic plants are notorious agricultural pests that drain nutrients from crops and cause economic losses of more than USD 1 billion due to yield losses every year. Yet these plants almost never ...

This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine. Mistletoe is more than just a Yuletide kissing attraction; it plays a hugely important role in ecosystems. It is a parasitic plant—it takes ...

Balanophora shed one third of its genes as it evolved into a streamlined parasitic plant -- an extreme degree of genome shrinkage even among parasites. Along the way this subtropical plant developed ...