Rare Albino Redwoods May Hold Clues to Ecosystem Health

Atlas Obscura's profile of California's ghostly albino redwoods — Sequoia sempervirens that lack chlorophyll and grow as white, parasitic shoots tethered to a normal parent tree. Tom Stapleton has spent years cataloguing them on private and protected lands thirty miles north of San Francisco. New research suggests these "ghosts of the forest," once dismissed as parasitic burdens, may serve their hosts by hyper-accumulating heavy metals (cadmium, nickel, copper) drawn up from the soil — effectively a botanical kidney filtering toxins out of the larger organism in stressed ecosystems.