@ Eliza Strickland / Online News Editor

Your reply @ Phoenix sounds correct. I’ve taken photos of albino redwood trees and albino redwood foliage. It can look very white. The photo is almost certainly a real photograph. I’ve seen it at Wikimedia Commons several times. I see what Phoenix was calling blades of grass, but the lines are so faded, they could easily be twigs, lichens or other vegetation.

QUOTE
When times get tough, the parent tree withdraws all support and the seedlings perish, turning brown. In times of abundant rain, they sprout again, flourishing. “They come and go, like ghosts,” Kuty said. “They starve to death and shrink back. Then they reappear.”
END QUOTE

The typical albino redwood is not a seedling. Seedlings come from seeds that germinated. That’s not how this works. These are actually connected as a part of the main tree.

Any energy or moisture that they draw would be very minor and inconsequential. About 95% of a plant comes from water and atmosphere. Barely 5% from the soil. So the small amount of moisture is the main substance used by the small albino redwoods.

MDV

– Eliza, DISCOVER online news editor

This is clearly the case because the blades of grass (visible in the lower-right-hand corner of the photo) also appear stark white.

The red tone to the branch could be the natural color yielded with an infrared filter, or could have also been added during post-processing.

Albinism is a genetic defect, and other than in cases where an entity has adapted to a life devoid of light, is usually a weakness.

For plants it is even more so. Thus, while you may be correct in numbers possibly increasing, it will be due to sustained stress on the genetics of the trees, not natural selection.

The use of vampiric here is in reference to the stealing of blood or lifeforce from another entity in a completely parasitic manner. Vampire is a term commonly used in such a manner, including to reference leaches, mosquitoes and flies since you brought them up.

You only argue the definition to try to make your point seem more valid.

Vampirism refers to the feeding behavour of some mammal species. Such mammals use their teeth to penetrate the blood supply of another (host) mammal body. To describe the life cycle of the Albino Redwood as a blood sucker is bissare. What next? Will we read of blood sucking, vampiric leachers, mosquitoes or flies!

Oh and here is a curious idea. Since evolution favours no colour over another, it is possible that one day in the future the Albino Redwood may not be rare. Just look in the mirror. White skinned people were once an extreme oddity of this planet.

Pretty cool in any case that a species that is normally green can support this even in rare cases.

I do own the dutch(netherlands) plantcollection’s of Sequoia and Sequoiadendron, and that means that we collect all kind off information about these plants. Besides a lot of plants and books and other material i also visited the trees many times. Also in the hope to find one the the ghost redwoods, mentioned in one of my books. But i never found one. Can someone help me more about finding one to make some pictures. Or is there someone who can share some pictures?

many thanks in advance

[Moderator's note: edited the cuss word.]

What happened to people that can write without interjecting garbage, I would expect more from discover magazine; apparently I shouldn’t.

Call me crazy, but wouldn’t it be just a smidge less cruel if they used trees instead of something like, oh, human beings? Just a smidge, mind you.