Ethereal New Plant Species Doesn’t Use Photosynthesis – It’s Found Something Sneakier
1st January 2023
Wood wide webs – incredible networks of fungi and plant roots that span entire forests – act as highways for nutrient deliveries as well as wires for transferring information between plants via electrical and chemical signals. These connections help strengthen a forest as a whole, by distributing resources from nutrient poor to nutrient rich areas of the network. They also allow plants to warn each other of predators and even help protect them from drought.
In exchange for these services, plants pay their fungi allies with some of the hydrocarbons they produce using photosynthesis.
But Monotropastrum betrays this mutualistic relationship by stealing all its nutrients from the fungi, offering no photosynthetic products to the network in return – making them part of a very selective mycoheterotrophic club.