Botanical Brain Teaser #1: Vampire Plant
The following is an article that I wrote as an intern at the herbarium of the Royal Botanical Gardens. It appeared in RBG’s magazine Paradise Found and in every issue, the current botany intern composes a puzzle for readers to solve. They choose a specimen from among the cabinets and describe the species leaving enough of a mystery that readers must guess and write-in their answers. I loved writing these, so I’m sharing them here along with images of the herbarium specimens that accompanied them. I cropped this top image to obscure the label so you can make a guess and post it in the comment section at the bottom. Then, click the “Answer” link to see the full herbarium specimen image including the label to check if you were right. Enjoy!
Can you name the plant represented in this RBG herbarium specimen? The specimen was collected on August 31, 1967 by Claude E. Garton, a prolific botanist who has over 250 specimens in our herbarium alone. He found the plant growing on the shore of Black Sturgeon Lake, near Thunder Bay, in a Jack Pine-Black Spruce forest. The plant’s native range includes all of North America and extends as far south as Colombia as well as Eastern Asia from India to Japan. Here at RBG, the plant can be found (if you’re lucky) in Cootes Paradise, Hendrie Valley and Rock Chapel. It lives in rich, moist forests and can inhabit some very dark spots where most plants would be starved for light.
This peculiar plant, sometimes confused for a fungus, is able to live in near darkness because it does not photosynthesize, although it still gets energy from the sun through a sneaky, indirect route. You may not realize it but many forest trees have, entwined around their roots, tiny fungal filaments called mycorrhizae; the fungi increase the surface area of the tree roots so that they can absorb more water and minerals and in exchange the fungi get some of the sugars that the tree produces via photosynthesis. A tidy mutualism, don’t you think? Well, our mystery plant exploits this relationship by tapping its roots directly into the fungal filaments, siphoning off the tree’s sugars indirectly. It’s a veritable vampire of the forest!
Seeing that this plant does not convert light into energy, it has little need for leaves and so they have become reduced, over the course of its evolution, to small bracts. In fact, it has no use at all for green chlorophyll either, so its tissues have lost all pigmentation and are a ghostly translucent white in appearance (though rare morphs can also be pink to red in colour). Each stem bears a single, nodding, bell-shaped flower with 5 overlapping petals so thin and pigment-less that they are almost transparent. Unfortunately, the tissues turn black when dried, so no herbarium specimen will ever capture their phantasmal beauty. You’ll just have to go out and find it for yourself! They come up in late summer to late autumn and although they are uncommon, if you do see one, keep an eye out for more nearby because they often grows in patchy clumps. And, as always, please leave this spooky little vampire to do its thing: take only picture and leave only footprints.
