A parasitic red plant

June 20, 2013 • 11:17 am

I don’t feature nearly enough plants on this site, and that’s because I was trained as a zoologist and don’t know much about botany.

But here’s a nice specimen. It’s the beautiful snow plant (Sarcodes sanguinia), a plant without chlorophyll. It’s a saprophyte, which means it lives on dead or decaying organic mater, and steals nutrients from the roots of pine trees via a shared underground fungus.  

Let the rangers of California’s Yosemite National Park explain it to you:

By the way, my collections of fruit flies in America’s national parks taught me that the rangers, and especially the ranger-naturalists, are a tremendous resource for the visitor interested in science. By all means take advantage of their expertise if you visit the parks. They love to answer questions about geology and biology, which are a welcome break from inquiries like “where are the restrooms?” and “can we bring guns here?”

19 thoughts on “A parasitic red plant”

  1. Haha! “Can we bring our guns and religion here?”.

    Saprophytes…I didn’t know plants like that existed. I learned something new today!

    1. If we want to be picky (and I always do)…

      “It’s a saprophyte, which means it lives on dead or decaying organic mater, and steals nutrients from the roots of pine trees via a shared underground fungus.”

      These are separate things. No plants, so far as I know, are saprophytic–they do not obtain sugars or other nutrients from dead or decaying organic matter except in the very general sense that mineral nutrients (N, P, K, etc.) in the soil probably went through a living organism at some point.

      On the other hand, various plants do get sugars et al. from mycorrhizal fungi–these plants are myco-heterotrophic. Neither the plants nor the fungi are saprophytic; the plants are parasites on fungi, the fungi are mycorrhizal.

      The description in the video from 3:15 to 4:10 seems to be dead on.

    1. Well, not all orchids, but a subset of them, especially the non-chlorophyll-producing ones.

      Even more interesting when you consider the fact that as orchids, they’re already dependent on a specific kind of mycorrhizal relationship (one different from the ectomycorrhizal network they’ll eventually feed off of) to be able to germinate and grow in the first place.

    1. According to botony.org :-

      The fruits are colorful and fleshy at this stage, and might think that some fruit-eating animal might be attracted to them. However, when they are mature, the fruits of the snow plant are dry and shed fruits through slits in the fruit wall. […] Nobody knows how they are dispersed from one place to another. In order to grow, they must become buried in the leaf litter of a conifer forest. Probably they need to contact particular fungi in order to germinate. The geographical range of the snow plant is probably limited by the extent of the conifers and the fungi that the snow plant depends upon

      The plants are found in little colonies with large gaps between colonies.

      1. Interesting. (Said the sheepish man who realizes that he could just as easily googled it himself.)

  5. You can bring in your legal firearms but cannot shoot them, or carry them in certain marked places. Use of bear spray is prohibited as well. I suspect, if a bear wanted me for lunch, and I had available an effective illegal means to dissuade it, I would use same.

  7. That is very pretty.

    As a botanist, I second what aspidoscelis wrote above. Lots of achlorophyllous plants are mistakenly called “saprophytic” but AFAIK they are all really parasitic. Some parasitize on other plants (mistletoes, broomrape, etc.), others parasitize on fungi (parasitic orchids, Monotropa, etc.). The latter state has likely evolved out of mycorrhiza, a symbiotic relationship with fungi.

    Haven’t done many yet, but here are a few more parasitic plants in case somebody is interested, although the Viscum is only hemiparasitic:
    http://phylobotanist.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/botany-picture-40-dipodium-variegatum.html
    http://phylobotanist.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/botany-picture-20-viscum-minimum.html
    http://phylobotanist.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/botany-picture-16.html

  8. Oh, it’s a flower. When I saw “Parasitic Red Plant” I naturally figured that is was an artfully concealed communist spy…

    I’ll leave now.

  9. At the risk of being pedantic, there’s really no such thing as a “saprophyte”, which literally means a plant that can consume dead organic matter. No plant has the proper physiology for that – though it was once (wrongly) hypothesized that achlorophyllous plants got their food this way, hence the name. However, there are a few plants that can directly parasitize other plants, and quite a few mycoheterotrophs, like Sarcodes, that are essentially hacking into the common mycorrhizal fungal network shared by the dominant forest trees.

    And at the further risk of self-promotion, I wrote an article about mycoheterotrophs a few years back:

    http://www.mykoweb.com/articles/Myco-Heterotrophs.html

  11. No plant has the proper physiology for that – though it was once (wrongly) hypothesized that achlorophyllous plants got their food this way, hence the name. However, there are a few plants that can directly parasitize other plants

    1. Noni Shampoo @ #11

      There are indeed a few truly parasitic on other plants, and not using fungi as an intermediary. Notably Cuscuta (dodder) However, they’re not “saprophytic” in the sense of breaking down dead organic matter the way many fungi and bacteria do, but rather directly parasitizing the vascular system of their hosts.

      There are also quite a few plants (such as Castilleja (indian paintbrush) that are “water parasites”, directly getting water from the xylem of the host. Those species are not achlorophylous, though and get their food via photosynthesis like other plants.

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