Black Flora

Black flora is the flora of the melanophyta kingdom. Most of them are black or have black parts though some lost their colors in hot biomes.

Anatomy
The black flora are built of three major parts: the roots, which contain water and are used to cool the plant and absorb nutrients; the stalk, and the spore chamber. Some black flora also evolved leaves, flowers, and skirts as well.

Behavior
Most black flora act just like Earth  plants and grow towards the light. However some mobile black flora have evolved ways to avoid herbivores by moving. Greyscale Algae have adapted to change from black to white to prevent overheating.

Breathing and Blood
Black flora respiration is just like Earth's plants where they breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen. Their sap is mainly black from the black chloroplasts it uses for photosynthesis, however starflora have a light-blue cytoplasm as well.

Diet & Energy
All black flora are black because they absorb all visible light. This causes them to easily overheat, and so they therefore use a system of roots in order to cool themselves as well as to absorb nutrients. Some black flora are in fact not black, but grayish. Such is the bulbstalk, which lives in the desert and therefore in order not to overheat changed its color to a lighter shade of gray.

Evolution
The black flora evolved from the black algae of the melanophyta kingdom. They evolved right after the gamma ray disaster when Glicker was almost barren. They therefore adapted to life on land and filled all the empty biomes, mainly in the north. The main biome they evolved and varied in was the Yokto Forest.

Locomotion
Black flora are more or less immobile except for some semi-mobile aquatic species such as Swish Starflora which can swim in the water or Creeping Starflora which crawls on the bottom of the sea.

Reproduction
Though most black flora use asexual reproduction methods, some are more like the puffstalk - the first to reproduce sexually. The one thing all black flora has in common is that they use spores for reproduction. These spores are released from a chamber on top of the stalk that releases them and they are mostly carried through the air. The only irregular is the seedpuff, which reproduces using seeds.

Senses
Black Flora have limited senses. All can sense where the light is and grow towards it, however some have evolved mechanoreceptive senses of touch, such as the Marsh-Column Stalk that can recognize daily movements in the water and move out of the way of floating material.

Size
The tallest black flora is the Seedpuff, which can grow up to 8 m tall! The smallest black flora is Algaaquila which originally started the lineage as a microbe.

Types of Black Flora
There are 4 main types of black flora: the original microbes of various configurations; starflora, which resemble photosynthetic starfish; bolagae which are floating black balls in the sea and of course the orange spore black flora which are similar to Earth plants.