Smells like trouble

I've never even heard of the dodder...is it real? Are there any readers out there with this problem? Maybe you should start planting tomatoes as decoys!

The parasitic dodder plant doesn't have a nose, but it knows how to sniff out its prey.

The dodder attacks such plants as tomatoes, carrots, onions, citrus trees, cranberries, alfalfa and even flowers, and is a problem for farmers because chemicals that kill the pesky weed also damage the crops it feeds on. So discovering how it finds its prey might help lead to a way to block the weed, or for crops to defend themselves, say researchers at Pennsylvania State University.

The question of how dodder finds a host plant has puzzled researchers. Many thought it simply grew in a random direction, with discovery of a plant to attack being a chance encounter.

But the researchers led by Consuelo M. De Moraes found that if they placed tomato plants near a germinating dodder, the parasite headed for the tomato 80 percent of the time.

And when they put scent chemicals from a tomato on rubber, 73 percent of the dodder seedlings headed that way.

Link: Northwest Florida Daily News: Smells like trouble: Parasitic weed sniffs out its prey.