Apodanthaceae
The family Apodanthaceae comprises about 10 species of endoparasitic herbs. They live in the branches or stems of their hosts (as filaments similar to a fungal mycelium), emerging only to flower and fruit. The plants produce no green parts and do not carry out any photosynthesis (that is, they are holoparasitic). There are two genera: Pilostyles and Apodanthes. A third genus, Berlinianche, was never validly published.
The native range of Apodanthes is restricted to Central and tropical South America, while Pilostyles has a much wider though disjointed native range, encompassing many countries in tropical and subtropical America, a section of Africa from Gabon to Tanzania and down to Zimbabwe, as well as Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Western Australia.
2 branches of this family, most-observed first
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Where it lives
Recorded sightings
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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
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In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Apodanthaceae in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 71405.