One of the world's weirdest plants

It looks like a kid's plasticine model of a fungus, ornpossibly some kind of sex toy, but it's actually one of the world's weirdest plants. This is balanophora fungosa. It doesn't really have a common name, although it's sometimes called fungus root. It's said to smell like mice!

It's pretty rare, growing only in the steamy subtropical mountains of Taiwan and parts of Japan. It has some close relatives in South Asia, South-East Asia, Australia and some Pacific Islands. It's actually an angiosperm, or flowering plant, related to, you know, daisies, roses and such like, but it's very different from daisies and roses in several respects.

For one thing, it contains no chlorophyll.and.so does not grow by photosynthesis like most plants. It also lacks a conventional root system, instead attaching itself to the roots of nearby treees and stealing its nutrients parasitically (although it does still retain some plastids, the organelles that normal plants use to enable photsynthesis).

The plant can also reproduce without fertilization, which is very rare in the plant world, using a process known as "facultative aganospermy" - essentially, it clones itself. This can be useful, but it also leave it highly vulnerable to habitat loss, as it is very dependent on specific confutions and tree hosts.

It does technically have flowers and seeds, some of the smallest flowers and seeds in the plant world. Thousands of tiny female flowers are contained the bulbous structure at the top, with a much smaller number of male flowers are at its base.

So, yes, pretty weird. And, of course, given its very specific habitat and the encroachment of humans, it's endangered.