Dodder

Description:

A very unusual weed with a lot of Nicknames. Dodder, Love Vine, Knot Weed, Strangleweed, Stranglevine, Angel’s Hair, Devil’s-Guts, Goldthread, Pull-Down, Devil’s Ringlet, Hellbind, Hairweed, Devil’s Hair, Hailweed, Tangle Gut, and Witches Shoelaces. strangle tare, scaldweed, beggarweed,[3] lady's laces, fireweed, wizard's net, , devil's hair, hailweed, , hellbine, ,and witch's hair. vampire plant. A weed that suck the life out of plants, but Is hard to kill. Dodder, Cuscuta spp., was once placed in the morning glory family but has been reclassified into its own family, Cuscutaceae. There are over 150 species worldwide, many of them occurring in the U.S. Its color alone reveals one of the more unusual characteristics of Dodder. The plant contains very little (if any) chlorophyll, the chemical that enables plants to use sunlight to produce food . Dodder's lack of chlorophyll is what gives its color. Since Dodder doesn't produce its food, you may wonder how it gets the nutrients it needs to survive. Dodder is unlike many other plants, it is a parasite that need "hosts" from which they can obtain food. However, instead of animals, the host organisms for Dodder are plants. It is a parasitic annual plant that infects a wide assortment of mostly herbaceous plants. Some are host specific and attack only legumes, whereas others have a wider host range . It is an obligate parasite, meaning it provides no benefit to its host plant but is dependent on the host plant for its survival. Once it is firmly attached to its host, the roots of a Dodder plant die. Thus, it loses its connection to the ground and depends entirely on its companion plant for survival. It certainly doesn't have green stems and leaves like "normal" plants . Much of the time it doesn't even have roots. Instead, it is suspended in mid-air through its attachments to other plants. Dodder continues to grow until its host can no longer provide enough food for both itself and its parasite. At that point, the host plant will die. If the Dodder is not connected to any other host plants, it will die, too. It looks like tangled string that wraps around plants like a spider web. Stems are pale yellow to yellow-orange sometimes tinged with red or purple and stand out due to their bright color. Flowers occur in clusters and are bell-shaped, cream to pink in color and around an eighth of an inch long. Each flower produces a 1/8th-inch-diameter fruit that contains one to four seeds yellow to brown/black in color and almost round in shape. They have one round and two flat sides with a fine rough surface. A single dodder vine can produce up to 3,000 seeds, which are ejected in a circle up to 10 feet in diameter. Seeds require sun, warmth and moisture to germinate. If conditions are not favorable, they can lie dormant for years. When a seedling reaches its destination (having grown large enough), it will begin wrapping its stems around its host plant. The Dodder will then grow nodes that attach it to its new host plant, nodes through which it can remove food. Vines always grow counterclockwise and are like plants on steroids and once was observed for seven hours and, in that time, it wrapped around a host stem four times. It is usually leafless but sometimes they have very small scale-like triangular leaves that are barely visible.

Habitat:

Salt marsh.

Notes:

The photos show two major host plants. The Railroad vine and Typha grass.