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

“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” Kenji Suetsugu, a botanist at Kobe University in ...

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

Balanophora is a plant that abandoned photosynthesis long ago and now lives entirely as a parasite on tree roots, hidden in ...

If you grow flowers in your garden, you'll want to keep a sharp lookout for an invasive, parasitic plant that has been detected in the U.S. for the first time.

At the base of mossy trees, deep in the mountains of Taiwan and mainland Japan or nestled in the subtropical forests of ...

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

Balanophora lost photosynthesis long ago but kept tiny plastids that run key chemistry and shows how forest parasites adapt ...

A dodder plant begins its life looking like a tapeworm. The tiny plant, which will never grow leaves or roots, elongates in a spindly spiral. Round and round it swirls, searching for a host plant.

Parasitic weeds extract water and nutrients from their host plants. But what makes these parasites so successful? A study led ...

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