Cassytha filiformis (Bahamian love vine) (San Salvador Island, Bahamas) 3 (48303459271)

Description:

Cassytha filiformis Linnaeus, 1753 - Bahamian love vine (= orangish-brown & yellowish-brown) in the Bahamas. Plants are multicellular, photosynthesizing eucaryotes. Most species occupy terrestrial environments, but they also occur in freshwater and saltwater aquatic environments. The oldest known land plants in the fossil record are Ordovician to Silurian. Land plant body fossils are known in Silurian sedimentary rocks - they are small and simple plants (e.g., Cooksonia). Fossil root traces in paleosol horizons are known in the Ordovician. During the Devonian, the first trees and forests appeared. Earth's initial forestation event occurred during the Middle to Late Paleozoic. Earth's continents have been partly to mostly covered with forests ever since the Late Devonian. Occasional mass extinction events temporarily removed much of Earth's plant ecosystems - this occurred at the Permian-Triassic boundary (251 million years ago) and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (65 million years ago). The most conspicuous group of living plants is the angiosperms, the flowering plants. They first unambiguously appeared in the fossil record during the Cretaceous. They quickly dominated Earth's terrestrial ecosystems, and have dominated ever since. This domination was due to the evolutionary success of flowers, which are structures that greatly aid angiosperm reproduction. The Bahamian love vine, Cassytha filiformis, is an angiosperm that is globally distributed in tropical environments. Leaves are so highly reduced that the plant appears leafless. The vine itself ranges in color from greenish to orangish brown. The latter color indicates an achlorotic nature (Visser, 1981), but it has also been asserted that the chlorophyll is merely masked in non-green individuals (Nelson, 2008). Cassytha filiformis is a parasitic plant - it covers and derives nourishment from host plants. Classification: Plantae, Angiospermophyta, Magnoliidae, Laurales, Lauraceae Locality: near shoreline, western French Bay, southwestern San Salvador Island, eastern Bahamas See info. at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassytha_filiformis References cited: Visser (1981) - South African Parasitic Flowering Plants. 177 pp. Nelson (2008) - Cassytha filiformis. University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, Plant Disease 42. 10 pp. (see: www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PD-42.pdf )