Description :

• Perennial or annual herbs; stem generally reduced or absent; stolons forming framework of plant, radiating from peduncle base and usually ramifying, at nodes bearing leaves and sometimes rhizoids, inflorescences and bladder-like traps
• Leaves arising from various parts of plant, solitary or forming rosettes; those of terrestrial species mostly ± petiolate, narrowly linear to obovate, often decayed before flowering; those of aquatic species divided into filiform or capillary segments; traps (utricles) found on some or all vegetative organs, globose or ovoid, with trap door or mouth and wide variety of external appendages, mostly near mouth; inside of trap glandular
• Flowers bracteate, sometimes bracteolate, in pedunculate racemes, rarely reduced to single flowers; held sometimes above water by whorl of inflated leaves; peduncle erect or twining
• Calyx longer than corolla tube, 2-partite, generally accrescent, upper lobe usually entire, lower ± bifid
• Corolla : tube ± 0; upper lip entire, 2(3)-lobed, with basal sac housing sex organs; lower lip usually much larger, spurred or rarely saccate at base, usually with vaulted, much-raised and 2- or 3-gibbous palate; limb entire, emarginate, 2- or 3-lobed
• Stamens 2, arising at junction of 2 corolla lips; filaments generally short, fleshy, flattened and incurved; thecae ± distinct to confluent
• Ovary globose or ovoid; style usually short, thick and persistent, often accrescent; stigma often unequally 2-lobed
• Fruit a capsule, generally globose or ovoid, latter often somewhat compressed, dehiscing variously, including breaking into 2 valves and splitting in circumscissile manner, rarely indehiscent
• Seeds usually very small, subglobose or ovoid to cylindrical, sometimes ± angular from mutual compression, closely packed to overlapping on placenta
• x = 6, 7, 8, 11 (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Utricularia L.
  • Linnaeus: 18 (1753)
  • Stapf: 423 (1904)
  • Lloyd: 75, t. 7-10 (1936)
  • Taylor: 1 (1964)
  • Schreiber: 1 (1968)
  • Taylor: 9 (1988)
  • Taylor: 1 (1989)
  • Cook: 115 (1990)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 180; cosmopolitan, mainly tropical and subtropical
• Southern Africa : Species 18, widespread, in water and in wet areas