A Creepy Monster of the Forest: The Albino, Vampiric Redwood Tree

Organisms with albino mutations are pretty weird in general, but albino plants are extra weird. 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. Historian Sandy Lyndon explained the phenomenon to KQED: