What looks like a mushroom, but isn’t a fungus, and after losing much of what characterized its botanical ancestors, evolved into one of nature’s most bizarre parasites instead?
If you guessed Balanophora, arguably one of the botanical kingdom’s most unusual assets, you’d be correct. This bizarre plant may resemble a mushroom, but it is actually a parasitic plant with extremely rare traits that have long puzzled biologists.
“Balanophora has lost much of what defines it as a plant, but retained enough to function as a parasite,” according to Dr. Petra Svetlikova, the lead author of a new study detailing this unusual, almost vampiric example of flora.
“It’s a fascinating example of how something so strange can evolve from an ancestor that looked like a normal plant with leaves and a normal root system,” Svetlikova adds.
Balanophora
Plants in the genus Balanophora may bear an obvious resemblance to mushrooms. Still, it is their equal visual similarity to acorns that led to their name, which comes from the Greek word balanos, meaning “acorn,” and photos, meaning “bearing.”
In the past, studying the plants has proven challenging. They are rare and grow only under highly specific conditions: at the base of certain local mossy trees in Japan and Taiwan, where they siphon nutrients from the surrounding roots. Since Balanophora has some of the smallest seeds and flowers in the world and lacks a root system of its own or chlorophyll for photosynthesis, it must rely on siphoning nutrients from the trees it grows under, almost like a vampire slowly drawing blood from its victims.
These very specific conditions that support the odd plant’s existence are often threatened by human development, further reducing botanists’ ability to investigate these strange plants. However, international researchers have collaborated to study Balanophora in some of its most inaccessible habitats. The team, from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Kobe University, and the University of Taipei, has reported insights into the plant genus in a paper published in New Phytologist.
Sampling across numerous Balanophora populations provided essential data for the team to reconstruct the evolutionary tree across East Asia. The Balanophoraceae family, of which Balanophora is a member, is one of the most ancient entirely parasitic plant families. It dates back to the mid-Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago, when the first land plants lost their photosynthetic ability.
Parasitic Feeding
The international team’s up-close research has enabled it to track Balanophora’s evolutionary history, revealing how the genus’s organelles function in unusual ways to support its parasitic feeding.
Typically, as parasitic plants rely more on their hosts, their feeding organelles, called plastids, lose genes or are lost entirely. Although Balanophora are utterly dependent on host plants, they have avoided succumbing to this effect, with reduced but intact plastids remaining. Still, only 20 plastid genes remain out of what can typically be as many as 200. Even these simple plastids may still play a role, as plants take up more than 700 proteins through cytoplasm, the team reports.
“That Balanophora plastids are still involved in the biosynthesis of many compounds unrelated to photosynthesis was surprising,” said co-author Filip Husnik of OIST. “It implies that the order and timing of plastid reduction in non-photosynthetic plants is similar to other eukaryotes, such as the malaria-causing parasite, Plasmodium, which originated from a photosynthetic ancestor.”
Unusual Reproduction
Notably, the researchers also found that reproduction differed markedly across Balanophora populations. Some populations reproduced through fertilization, as is typical, while others reproduced asexually. In other cases, some were observed reproducing through both methods.
Such asexual reproduction is rare in plants because it reduces genetic diversity, potentially leading to generations with accumulating harmful mutations. However, in this case, this reproductive method enabled Balanophora to reproduce in a niche typically inhospitable to most plants: dark, moist undergrowth. Under such conditions, the plants will select only from a tiny pool of tree species as hosts.
“We’re very thankful to our collaborators Dr. Huei-Jiun Su and Dr. Kenji Suetsugu, experts on parasitic plants, for their help in sampling the studied Balanophora species, and to local authorities in Okinawa that allowed us to study these extraordinary plants,” said Dr. Svetlikova.
“Most known habitats of Balanophora are protected in Okinawa, but the populations face extinction by logging and unauthorized collection,” she added.
“We hope to learn as much as we can about this fantastic, ancient plant before it’s too late. It serves as a reminder of how evolution continues to surprise us.”
The paper, “Phylogenomics Clarifies Balanophora Evolution, Metabolic Retention in Reduced Plastids, and the Origins of Obligate Agamospermy,” appeared in New Phytologist on November 26, 2025.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.