E: after a little 'research' and reading comments here. it turns out that's an extra part of the plant for catching water bugs/prey. glad I didn't rip it off. also, sorry about photo quality. I spent 10min. trying to get the top & roots equally in focus but that was my best.
That's no buttercup. It's a type of aquatic carnivorous plant called a bladderwort, from the genus Utricularia. It looks like U. inflata to me, which is native to the southeastern US, has some non-native presence in the Northeast, and is flat out invasive in Washington State because they can form very dense mats and eat a lot of small water bugs.
Do not bring it in before the first frost. This is one of the easier carnivorous plants to grow and does not necessarily need a dormancy but it's still more likely to die in care than in the wild.
That thing you thought was a weed is its network of tendrils that have the bladders it uses to catch prey.
Edit: While you're all here.
Not all bladderworts are aquatic like this one. There are also terrestrial species, like the funny looking bunny ears flower U. sandersonii, or the tree dwelling species with really cool flowers such as U. reniformis
Bladderworts are closely related to two other carnivorous plants, which are butterworts and corkscrew plants.
Just to add, they are one of the fastest evolving plant orders known, with extreme levels of species divergence. The theory is that a single mutation that greatly boosted their respiration rates (yes, at night plants have to breathe air just as mammals do) ended up exposing their chromosomes to an enormous amount of oxygen gas. Pure oxygen actually destroys chromosomes, so such a mutation is normally deadly to an organism, but these plants also happened to have yet another altered gene that made them much better at nuclear DNA repair. So you get a combination of "our genes get scrambled by free radical oxygen constantly" and "we can fix the damage better than most" and end up with an entire order that has a significantly faster background evolution rate than the rest of the plant kingdom. This has led to a very strange anatomy for these plants - they are both incredibly simplified in that their leaves, roots, and stems are basically the same organ tissue with very little segregation or specialized cells that you would expect in a flowering plant, but their bladderwort traps are the most sophisticated structure in the entire plant kingdom, capable of pulling in prey in 1/100th of a second, equipped with sensate antennae that give the plant a sense of touch, specialized cells that pump water out of the trap to create the required water pressure needed to spring it, other specialized cells that secrete mucilage at the entrance to the trap to act as a seal once the trap is sprung, and even further specialized cells that work to digest captured prey. It is almost like their body plan is like the character Kuato from Total Recall, a genius growing out of the torso of his braindead brother George - some of the most advanced plant structures seen in nature living on a stem/root/leaf thing that looks like something you'd expect on a primitive non-vascular plant.
totallywickedtubular on September 7th, 2019 at 15:29 UTC »
here's me taking it out of the water: https://i.imgur.com/lY2GmyN.gifv (that's just some fresh water weed stuck to the bottom)
E: after a little 'research' and reading comments here. it turns out that's an extra part of the plant for catching water bugs/prey. glad I didn't rip it off. also, sorry about photo quality. I spent 10min. trying to get the top & roots equally in focus but that was my best.
Cruzzfish1 on September 7th, 2019 at 16:28 UTC »
That's no buttercup. It's a type of aquatic carnivorous plant called a bladderwort, from the genus Utricularia. It looks like U. inflata to me, which is native to the southeastern US, has some non-native presence in the Northeast, and is flat out invasive in Washington State because they can form very dense mats and eat a lot of small water bugs.
Do not bring it in before the first frost. This is one of the easier carnivorous plants to grow and does not necessarily need a dormancy but it's still more likely to die in care than in the wild.
That thing you thought was a weed is its network of tendrils that have the bladders it uses to catch prey.
Edit: While you're all here.
Not all bladderworts are aquatic like this one. There are also terrestrial species, like the funny looking bunny ears flower U. sandersonii, or the tree dwelling species with really cool flowers such as U. reniformis
Bladderworts are closely related to two other carnivorous plants, which are butterworts and corkscrew plants.
Stewart_Games on September 7th, 2019 at 17:52 UTC »
Just to add, they are one of the fastest evolving plant orders known, with extreme levels of species divergence. The theory is that a single mutation that greatly boosted their respiration rates (yes, at night plants have to breathe air just as mammals do) ended up exposing their chromosomes to an enormous amount of oxygen gas. Pure oxygen actually destroys chromosomes, so such a mutation is normally deadly to an organism, but these plants also happened to have yet another altered gene that made them much better at nuclear DNA repair. So you get a combination of "our genes get scrambled by free radical oxygen constantly" and "we can fix the damage better than most" and end up with an entire order that has a significantly faster background evolution rate than the rest of the plant kingdom. This has led to a very strange anatomy for these plants - they are both incredibly simplified in that their leaves, roots, and stems are basically the same organ tissue with very little segregation or specialized cells that you would expect in a flowering plant, but their bladderwort traps are the most sophisticated structure in the entire plant kingdom, capable of pulling in prey in 1/100th of a second, equipped with sensate antennae that give the plant a sense of touch, specialized cells that pump water out of the trap to create the required water pressure needed to spring it, other specialized cells that secrete mucilage at the entrance to the trap to act as a seal once the trap is sprung, and even further specialized cells that work to digest captured prey. It is almost like their body plan is like the character Kuato from Total Recall, a genius growing out of the torso of his braindead brother George - some of the most advanced plant structures seen in nature living on a stem/root/leaf thing that looks like something you'd expect on a primitive non-vascular plant.