I enjoyed reading Nan Patterson’s column “Maine Observer: Indian pipes awaken sense of discovery” in the Aug. 23 Maine Sunday Telegram. I would like to add some more amazing detail about Indian pipes.

Nan Patterson notes the flowers do not have chlorophyll, but there is also no chlorophyll in the plant. So how does it live? Other plants make their own food via chloroplasts and photosynthesis with the sun.

But Indian pipes, with no photosynthesis ability, cannot make their own food. Instead, they steal it from trees and plants.

The vast majority of tree and plant rootlets are surrounded by the parts of mushrooms (fungi) that are in the ground, a vast network of white threads called mycelia. The mycelia absorb the trees’ sugars, and these sugars are then transported underground by this network to the rootlets of the Indian pipe (in this section of the U.S., Monotropa uniflora). The fungus involved with M. uniflora is either the mushroom russula or lactarius.

By the way, many trees and plants are also interconnected by this vast network of underground fungal mycelia. We really are interconnected!

Lawrence M. Leonard

Falmouth

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