Video narration
Why would a plant spend energy undoing its own work? Imagine following a recipe for photosynthesis: you reach for the ingredient that helps make food, but pick up the wrong one. That is photorespiration: not ordinary breathing, but a recipe mistake during photosynthesis. Rubisco normally grabs CO2, the carbon dioxide needed to build food. But it can grab oxygen instead. That is the turn: the plant is not choosing a useful alternate pathway. Rubisco has made a costly mistake. The wrong product cannot simply be thrown away. The plant recycles it through a detour, using energy and releasing CO2. Hot, dry conditions make this more likely: stomata close to save water, so less CO2 enters the leaf. So why spend energy undoing its work? Because Rubisco grabs oxygen instead of CO2. Photorespiration is the plant's costly recovery from that mistake: recycling the wrong recipe result.