Can you tell me more about Bladderworts with their tiny yellow flowers?
Answer
Hello and thank you for your question. The Bladderwort is a minute yellow flower, botanical name Utricularia, of which are many, many species.
“Bladderworts are the strangest and probably the most highly developed plant in the world. Nothing about them is familiar or makes them akin to other flowering plants except their flowers and ability to photosynthesize. In fact, bladderworts are so weird that a parade of famous botanists over the last two hundred years have puzzled over not only the complexity of their truly amazing traps but also what to call their various body parts. Do they have leaves? Stems? Roots? These simple questions left scientists scratching their heads, but a study of the animal-catching, pinhead-sized traps reduced the investigators to a cross-eyed stupor”…The Savage Garden by Peter d’Amato.
At last count, there are 214 species. Highly adaptable, bladderworts may be found in Alaskan swamps that are frozen most of the year; in quiet acidic ponds in sunny Florida; in wet, mossy South American trees; in fast-moving African streams; in seasonal Australian deserts; or even living in other plants such as the bromeliads. Some bladderworts survive ice by turning into dormant, hairy turion (shoot) buds. Others survive heat and drought by changing into underground tubers the size of a grain rice.
More here: http://www.carnivorousplants.org/cp/Genera/Utricularia.php
Here: http://botany.org/Carnivorous_Plants/Utricularia.php
And Here: http://michiganflora.net/genus.aspx?id=Utricularia
Hope this helps.
Courtesy of NYBG Plant Information
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