What are bladderworts like?

Bladderworts are some of the weirdest plants on earth.   Their tiny flowers which sit on top of a thin stem a few inches tall, often look like miniature orchids and can have stunning colors and great beauty.   bladderworts have no roots.   Their flowers are usually yellow and have two petals which look like lips.   Terrestrial and aquatic bladderworts call East Texas home.

Of the more than 200 bladderwort species world-wide, twenty are American natives, and five are Texas natives:

• Utricularia gibba , the humped bladderwort
  
  This bladderwort lives in shallow water and does not go dormant in the winter.   Imagine a floating tangle of thin green thread, with tiny bladders growing from it.   It traps and eats mosquito larvae, miniature worms and other little animals it sucks into its underwater bladder-traps.  

  It has bright yellow 1/4-inch long flowers with very thin red lines in the middle.   When they flower in June, one can see the edges of lakes and ponds be covered with a gorgeous sea of yellow.

• Utricularia cornuta, the horned bladderwort
  
  This bladderwort is almost identical to U. juncea, but larger.   It has bright yellow 3/4-inch long flowers, but much longer foot-long stems.   It flowers from June through Fall.

• Utricularia subulata, the zig-zag bladderwort
  
  This is a " weed " in the sense that it produces so much seed that it covers a lot of surface fast.   Their above-ground leaves (stolons) are green, very thin, less than a quarter of an inch, like tiny grass blades.

  Small bladder-traps grow from the below-ground leaves.   The frail stems cover themselves with very small droplets of glue, and the plant can produce seed even without flowering!  They flowers are usually about 1/4-inch long and can be as large as a 1/2 inch.

  
  

• Utricularia juncea, the southern bladderwort
  
  This annual carnivore is almost identical to U. cornuta but smaller.

• Utricularia purpurea, the purple bladderwort
  
  This free-floating, rootless carnivore has bladders similar to U. gibba growing out of whorled stems.  It has beautiful light purple flowers with a plotch of yellow-on-white on the bottom pedal.

• Utricularia radiata, the little floating bladderwort
  
  This little bladderwort forms a floating " cartwheel " when it flowers, from the center of which grows the flower stem.  These floats are modified stalks of leaves.   Smalll, round, bladder-like traps (like U. gibba), grow from submerged leaves. 

  When microscopic worms and larvae touch small hairs around the mouth of a bladder, they trigger the trap door of the bladder which sucks its victim inside.   It flowers from April to October and the hundreds of floating radiatas are quite a sight.
  
  They make excellent outside plants as well as great windowsill plants and are easy to grow.