Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Call it strangleweed, wizard's net, devil's guts, hellbine or witch's hair…or, if you prefer, lady’s laces, angel hair, goldthread ...

A dodder plant begins its life looking like a tapeworm. The tiny plant, which will never grow leaves or roots, elongates in a spindly spiral. Round and round it swirls, searching for a host plant.

About 4,000-5,000 parasitic plant species exist. Among these, dodders (Cuscuta, Convolvulaceae) are distributed worldwide. Compared with normal autotrophic plants, they have a unique morphology - they ...

Editor's note: Throughout the growing season, Mike Hogan, OSU Extension Educator for Agriculture & Natural Resources in Franklin County, will answer gardening questions submitted by Dispatch readers.

Parasitic dodders use outgrowths called haustoria to leech water and nutrients from their host plants. Jingxiong Zhang, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Parasitic ...

Around 1% of flowering plants are parasites. Some of these parasites can survive without host plants while others cannot. The former are called facultative parasites and the latter obligate parasites.

Dodders is a parasitic plant. That means it puts down roots into the stems of other plants and suck the water and nutrients out of them. Sometimes it can damage or kill the host plant, but most times ...

Call it strangleweed, wizard's net, devil's guts, hellbine or witch's hair…or, if you prefer, lady’s laces, angel hair, goldthread or love vine. It’s all the same to Cuscuta gronovii, a plant more ...