insectivorous herbs, aquatic or wetlands, roted in moist substrate to free-floating and lacking roots, sometimes epiphytic, vascular system often reduced, usually with iridoids.
Distribution
widespread, occurring from tropical to boreal regions; plants of wetlands, aquatic habitats, and moist forests.
Floral characters
Inflorescence indeterminate, on a scape, terminal, sometimes reduced to a single flower; flowers bisexual and bilateral. Sepals 4 or 5, distinct to connate, often 2-lipped. Petals 5, connate, the corolla 2-lipped, the lower lip usually with a nectar spur or sac, and often with a bulge obscuring the throat, the lobes imbricate. Stamens 2; filaments adnate to corolla, anthers unilocular; pollen grains tricolporate to multicolporate. Carpels 2, connate,; ovary superior, with free-central placentation; stigma unequally 2-lobed. Ovulles usually numerous, with 1 integument and a thin-walled megasporangium. Nectar disc lacking, and nectar prduced by corolla nectar spur.
Leaf characters
alternate or sometimes whorled, often in basal rosettes, simple, entire to finely divided, always highly modified; flat and densely coverded with sticky, mucilage-secreting and digestive hairs, and with margins inrolling in response to contact of glandular hairs with prey organism, or tubular and spiraled, with-downward pointing and digestive hairs and basal chamber, or not obvisiously foliaceous, highly dissected, bearing prey-catching bladders, eachwith two sensitive valves forming a trapdoor entrance, which opens inward in response to a stimulus conveyed by 4 sensory hairs and then immediately closes again, and lined on the inside with branched digestive hairs.
Stipules
absent
Fruit characters
usually a circumscissile, loculicidal, or irregularly dehiscent capsule; embryo +/- undifferentiated; endosperm lacking.
Glands
present
Hairs
Present, sessile to stalked, gland-headed
Uses
utricularia and pinguicula occasionally as novelty plants
Distribution maps
(online von http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/research/APweb/ . Dort zitiert wie unter jedem Diagramm vermerkt):
