Description
Key Characters:
Growth Form:
Aquatic or subaquatic herbs, carnivorous, with special vegetative organs adapted for digestion of captured small insects or crustaceans.
Stems:
Stems photosynthetic, delicate, creeping or floating.
Roots:
Roots absent.
Leaves:
Leaves absent.
Alternate, crowded into a basal rosette, sometimes with tubular trap–leaves arising from the rhizome.
Leaf-like organs forming entangled plumes of foliage up to 3 dm long, each one usually with 2–3 or more filiform segments up to 5 mm long and a few scattered bladders.
Surfaces glabrous.
Stipules absent.
Flowers:
Flowers ca. 1–4 on scapes 5–15 cm long, pedicels elongating to 10–25 mm long in fruit.
Flowers bisexual (perfect).
Calyx zygomorphic, 2(4)lobed, usually more deeply cleft laterally, forming an upper and lower lip, largest lobe suborbicular, 2–4 mm long, persistent, accrescent.
Corolla zygomorphic, bilabiate, the lobes imbricate, yellow, 6–12 mm long, lips subequal, projecting forward, spur oblong–conical, much shorter to somewhat longer than lower lip.
Stamens 2; anthers monothecal or dithecal, the thecae usually confluent.
Ovary superior, 2-carpellate, 1-celled, placentation free-central or basal; ovules (2–)numerous, anatropous; stigma unequally 2-lobed, papillate, wet.
Fruit:
Capsules 2–4 mm in diameter; globose to ovoid; dehiscent by longitudinal slits or valves; circumscissile or indehiscent.
Seeds (1–)numerous; winged; small; endosperm absent.
Ploidy:
2n = 28
Habitat:
Known from a single collection made in 1983 in wet forest along the Stainback Highway; Hawaiʻi (Stemmermann et al. 6815; BISH); and apparently sparingly naturalized.
Elevation Range: