Through pollination and feeding on all parts of plants, insects influence which plants thrive, which struggle, and even ...

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 ...

This resilient fruit tree adapts to almost any soil, fills your garden with color, and produces antioxidant-rich fruits for a ...

With its green, leathery leaves, the snake plant is considered an extremely robust and easy-care houseplant. However, few ...

A new study published in Science shows that these plants—called cycads—use infrared radiation from heat as a signal to ...

“Many people equate plants with photosynthesis, yet Balanophora illustrates that being a plant does not require being green,” ...

Traditionally, the plants associated with Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere - holly, ivy, mistletoe - are celebrated for their evergreen leaves in ...

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

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

The study reveals how Balanophora plants function despite abandoning photosynthesis and, in some species, sexual reproduction. Their plastid genomes shrank dramatically in a shared ancestor, yet the ...