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This little plant seems to have landed on this banana leaf as a seed within a bird dropping and is now growing.
River Ravine of the Corazon del Fortin, Fortin de Las Flores, Veracruz, Mexico.
It might be a tropical mistletoe seedling of the genus Psittacanthus. If so, it probably would not survive having landed on a leaf instead of a branch. Mistletoe is a parasite of many trees and comes in many forms, shapes and sizes. It is both bird pollenated and bird dispersed. The seeds pass through the digestive tract of a bird retaining their sticky coating which enable the seed to stick to whatever it falls on. http://apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/pdf/10....
Spotted on Feb 22, 2013
Submitted on Mar 16, 2013
11 Comments
Wow Andrea, that is so interesting - especially the "Snotty Gobbles" ha ha ha :D
Hi Lauren, we have numerous mistletoes here in the tropics, and it looked fleshy/leathery like the mistletoe. The 'playful' common name for them is "Snotty Gobbles" - stick to anything ;-) I have seen the seedling before on a branch of a tree and assumed it was a mistletoe.
Andrea, your question hit me like a brick! I've been studying mistletoe now for a couple of hours. It is so neat. I grew up on a ranch in the predominantly Oak (Valley Oak and some Live Oak) areas of the foothills of Mt. Diablo in central California. When I was little, my sister and I collected mistletoe at Christmas and sold little bags of it to anyone and everyone. I never considered that mistletoe was also tropical.....and it is! This could indeed be a mistletoe seedling germinating from it's sticky bird-transmitted seed. It probably would not survive because it landed on a leaf instead of a branch, but it does look like the seedlings in some of the pictures. Here are two of the links I liked best:
http://accidentalbotanist.wordpress.com/... and
http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr098....
This link is about the mistletoe I know from Oak in California:
http://www.hastingsreserve.org/oakstory/....
What made you think it was Mistletoe? So neat! :)
I wonder whether it is a mistletoe seedling? Good spotting Lauren!
true...but with this amount of "soil" it won't grow for long :/
Could be, inijica, doesn't seem to have any roots going in.
maybe is a sort of semiparasite?
Thank you auntnance for having seen this also, It was a first for me!
This happens all the time on the leaves of the shrubs under my birdfeeder--usually millet and milo seeds.
I didn't think that it could be growing from a seed in a bird dropping! It does look like that. I suppose it will wash off in the rain to the soil and continue growing. Very neat.
Probably from a bird dropping?