Dodder

a peculiar relative of the morning glory. There are some fifty kinds, all leafless, worthless plants that look like pale, unhealthy runners of a strawberry. The flowers are in fleshy green clusters. The characteristic of the dodder is parasitism. The dodder drops its seed in the ground, where it takes root and sends up a tendril-like shoot that fastens itself by suckers to the stem of some other plant. It sends in rootlets to suck the sap and lives on its host, dying away at the ground entirely. There are many common dodders-all agricultural pests-as clover dodder, flax dodder, hop dodder, etc. Often dodder is a tangled mass of green and yellow threads. A search in a tangled patch of weeds, sunflowers, and the like is likely to reveal the presence of dodder. The vines have no leaves and need none. The work done by leaves is done for them by the leaves of the host plant. See Parasite; Fungus