crookedindifference:

Albino Redwood

Ultra-rare albino redwood trees completely lack the green pigment chlorophyll, which they need to live (by photosynthesizing nutrients from light). These plants are literally vampires. They are pale (everwhite instead of evergreen), and they survive by sucking the life from other trees.

These vampires remain attached to the roots of their healthy, normal, parent trees (coastal redwoods can reproduce asexually by sprouting new shoots from roots or stumps), and survive by sucking energy from them. They can keep this up for a century.

Only about 25 of these trees are known to exist around the world, eight of which are at Henry Cowell State Park in California, where rangers and researchers from Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz are studying them…