How does a plant survive without any green chlorophyll to make food? With a little help from its neighbors.
Indian Pipes. (Courtesy and (c) Keith Dawson.)
Welcome to this week's edition of Something Wild. I'm Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
If you've been deep in the woods lately, you may have noticed a very interesting plant blooming about now.
How could you notice one plant out of all the gajillions around you? Well, this one definitely stands out. For starters, it's ghostly white, as in having no chlorophyll at all. This species doesn't need any green matter because even though it is a true flowering plant, it's found a pretty unique way around the whole photosynthesis thing.
I'm talking about Indian pipes. These weirdly, waxy wildflowers spring up in rich woodlands in late summer into fall. They look like upside-down pipes, which is how one assumes they got their name.
They're also vaguely reminiscent of mushrooms, and that's one clue to how they survive. Most fungi absorb nutrients from their surroundings, typically using their network of underground, rootlike threads. Some mushrooms go one step further, and tap into the roots of the trees growing near them to get an extra boost. The oaks or pines pass along some of the sugars they manufacture, and in return the mushrooms share minerals that only they can absorb from the soil.
This is where the Indian pipes step in for their piece of the action. They plug into the mushrooms and skim off a portion of the trees' sweet stuff for themselves. Why bother making your own food when there's all this intersoil commerce going on right under your own stems, right?
And, as far as botanists can tell, neither the tree nor the fungus get much, if anything, back in return for giving the Indian pipes a cut. Of course, as they say, nobody gets hurt either! So as far as I can tell, the Indian pipes are running a little protection racket out there in the woods!
(theme from "The Godfather")
Something Wild is a joint production of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, New Hampshire Audubon, and NHPR.
For Something Wild, I'm Rosemary Conroy.
