Hydrocotyle, also called floating pennywort, water pennywort, Indian pennywort, dollar weed, marsh penny, thick-leaved pennywort and white rot, is a genus of prostrate, perennial aquatic or semi-aquatic plants formerly classified in the family Apiaceae, now in the family Araliaceae.
Description
Water pennyworts, Hydrocotyles, are very common. They have long creeping stems that often form dense mats, often in and near ponds, lakes, rivers, and marshes, and some species in coastal areas by the sea.
- Leaves
- Simple, with small leafy outgrowth at the base, kidney shaped to round. Leaf edges are scalloped. The leaf surfaces of Hydrocotyle are prime grounds for oviposition of many butterfly species, such as Anartia fatima.
- Flowers
- Flower clusters are simple and flat-topped or rounded. Involucral bracts at the base of each flower. Indistinct sepals.
- Fruits and reproduction
- Elliptical to round with thin ridges and no oil tubes (vitta) which is characteristic in the fruit of umbelliferous plants.
- The prostrate plants reproduce by seed and by sending roots from stem nodes.
Selected species
There are over 280 species recognised in the genus Hydrocotyle that grow in tropical and temperate regions worldwide. A few species have entered the world of cultivated ornamental aquatics. A list of selected species:
Distribution
Hydrocotyleae grow in wet and damp places in the tropics and the temperate zones.
Fossil record
One fossil fruit of a Hydrocotyle sp. has been extracted from borehole samples of the Middle Miocene fresh water deposits in Nowy Sacz Basin, West Carpathians, Poland.
References
External links
- "Hydrocotyle". Integrated Taxonomic Information System. Retrieved 25 April 2008.
- Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de; Poiret, Jean Louis Marie (1783–1808). "HYD". Encyclopédie méthodique: botanique /Par m. le chevalier de Lamarck. Vol. 3. QK7.L36 1783-1808.
