Utricularia macrorhiza?
I love finding Utricularia, because the species identification
is always a potential puzzle. So what was the plant
before us? It was an aquatic free-floater, so that eliminated many of the other species in the area (such as
U. resupinata and so on). Clearly it was
a plant from "section Utricularia." Based on gross vegetative
morphology, I eliminated a few more possibilities like U. radiata or U. intermedia, and was left with species
like U. macrorhiza, U. minor, and U. gibba. I leaned towards
U. macrorhiza because the plants were so large--they would have been spectacularly large specimens if they
were one of the two latter
species. A check of the ultimate leaf segments revealed lateral setulae, eliminating
U. minor. So it was probably U. macrorhiza, even though it looked a little weird
for reasons that I had not quite yet formulated.
(I'm including this geeky information if you are curious about what goes on inside the mind of a person as they
identifying Utricularia. In case you care!)
