The mysterious Pilostyles is a plant within a plant
- Written by Steve Wylie, Molecular virology, virus ecology and evolution, metagenomics, symbiosis, Murdoch University
In 1946, forestry officer Charles Hamilton found something unusual on a shrubby native pea plant growing in Mundaring, near Perth. The pea had strange knobs on its stems, which looked like odd (and very un-pea-like) flowers.
When he showed these to government botanist Charles Gardner, Gardner initially dismissed them as “galls” (the plant equivalent of warts). However, a closer look quickly changed the story.
Read more: Welcome to Beating Around the Bush, wherein we yell about plants
Gardner realised he was holding a specimen of one of the world’s most extraordinary flowering plants. In 1948, he described it as Pilostyles hamiltonii.
Botanical Aliens
To get a sense of Gardner’s initial dismissal and later fascination, we need to describe Pilostyles. Most plants have a familiar structure of roots, stems, leaves and flowers, and grow in the ground. But a few plants abandon these to become parasites.
The strikingly beautiful Western Australian Christmas tree (Nuytsia floribunda), for example, looks like a normal tree, but it has specialist root structures that tap into the roots of other plants, stealing a free meal from them.
Pilostyles has taken parasitism to another level as an “endoparasite”: it lives inside its host. Unlike almost all other plants, Pilostyles has abandoned stems, leaves and roots. When not flowering, it lives inside its host, as pale threads of cells within the host’s roots and stems, from which it acquires all its nutrients.
Only when flowering is Pilostyles visible externally, the flowers erupting from the stems of its host like a weird botanical Alien.
Authors: Steve Wylie, Molecular virology, virus ecology and evolution, metagenomics, symbiosis, Murdoch University
Read more http://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-pilostyles-is-a-plant-within-a-plant-98767