Dodder

Dodder is an intriguing, miraculous little plant that doesn't even look like a plant. It resembles large tangles of pale-orange string or cooked, thin spaghetti strung limply over green vegetation in bottomland thickets, like the work of a jokester.

Dodder is a common species in the morning glory family, a family of plants noted for their large, showy, colorful flowers. But dodder is a strange morning glory. It has no chlorophyll to make it green, and to make its own food for growth like green plants do by combining hydrogen in water and carbon dioxide in the air, a process called photosynthesis, which is powered by sunlight. Without chlorophyll, dodder has become parasitic, taking its nourishment from other plants that it attaches itself to.

Dodder grows from minute seeds on the soil's surface and is adapted to growing toward nearby plants, a process called chemosensory clues. Somehow the young plants sense that vegetation is close by. The thin stem of each little plant attaches itself to a green plant, wraps around that vegetation and penetrates it with tiny projections that draw sugar-laden sap from the host plants, which is food for the dodder. When the dodder starts taking nutrition from the host plants, its roots in the ground die, and the dodder is totally parasitic on the hosts, with no connection to the soil. It's hard to imagine how dodder developed its parasitic lifestyle. But there are several kinds of dodder in the tropics where parasitic plants are numerous, living in the trees with no connection to soil. Perhaps competition for space and sunlight forced these plants to find other ways of getting nourishment, and eventually had no direct need for soil, and sunlight in the case of dodder.

Dodder grows quickly and soon its many slender, flexible stems, and their leaves that are reduced to minute, pale-orange scales, are draped over several neighboring plants. Some of the green host plants that manufacture food for both themselves and the dodder are weakened by the dodder draining their sugary sap. The dodder is like a cancerous growth. It is a parasite.

Dodder produces many clusters of tiny, white, waxy flowers that produce minute seeds in abundance. Those blossoms bloom from July into October. Their tiny seeds eventually get scattered across the ground where some of them will sprout in spring and try to find vegetation to crawl up.

Look for masses of light-orange dodder strung over vegetation in thickets, particularly later in summer when many tiny flowers are visible. It is an unusual plant.