Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small perennial herbs with short rhizomes, rarely annual herbs, acaulescent or caulescent, usually in bogs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually basal, sometimes cauline and alternate. The blade either an active trap that closes when touched or covered with mucilage–tipped tentacle hairs that contain irritable compounds to which insects adhere. Surfaces covered with long, glandular, tentacle hairs with swollen reddish heads that secrete a sticky glistening fluid to which flies and other insects adhere when contact is made. Petiolate. Stipules absent or dry and membranous and adnate to base of petiole.

Flowers: Flowers usually in helicoid cymes, rarely racemose or solitary. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic; open for only a short time, sometimes cleistogamous. Calyx of (4)5(–8) sepals; sepals ± connate at base, imbricate, persistent. Petals as many as sepals, distinct, convolute. Stamens (4)5(10–20), distinct or connate at base; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Pollen shed in tetrads. Ovary superior, 3(–5)-carpellate, 1-celled, parietal placentation; ovules numerous, anatropous; styles (1)3–5, distinct, often branched; stigmas as many as style tips.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules; rarely indehiscent. Seeds with a short; straight; basal embryo embedded in starchy endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: