A dodder plant begins its life looking like a tapeworm. The tiny plant, which will never grow leaves or roots, elongates in a spindly spiral. Round and round it swirls, searching for a host plant.

Editor's note: Throughout the growing season, Mike Hogan, OSU Extension Educator for Agriculture & Natural Resources in Franklin County, will answer gardening questions submitted by Dispatch readers.

About 4,000-5,000 parasitic plant species exist. Among these, dodders (Cuscuta, Convolvulaceae) are distributed worldwide. Compared with normal autotrophic plants, they have a unique morphology - they ...

Dodder is an obligate parasite of certain plants. This unusual member of the morning glory family is also known as “Angel’s Hair” and “Strangle Weed.” Like Indian pipe, another parasitic plant, Dodder ...

Jim Westwood, professor of plant pathology, physiology, and weed science, examines dodder, a parasitic plant with a covert weaponry system. Research at Virginia Tech and Penn State that has revealed ...

Parasitic dodders use outgrowths called haustoria to leech water and nutrients from their host plants. Jingxiong Zhang, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Parasitic ...

WASHINGTON — The parasitic dodder plant, or strangleweed, doesn't have a nose, but it knows how to sniff out its prey. The dodder attacks such plants as tomatoes, carrots, onions, citrus trees, ...

Have you seen that orange thread-like stuff draped over the top of plants in a salt marsh? It’s a parasitic annual plant called dodder, Cuscuta species. Dodder is capable of photosynthesis, but it ...

Around 4,000 to 5,000 plants are parasites. Most parasitic plants use an organ, named haustorium, to attach to and penetrate host plants to obtain water and nutrients. Some parasitic plants, such as ...

Researchers have investigated how the parasitic dodder Cuscuta australis controls flower formation. They showed that the parasite eavesdrops on the flowering signals of its host plants in order to ...

One of my traveler friends sent me a photo of her flowers invaded by a strange, almost alien-type growth. A yellow, spaghetti-like plant called dodder seemed to come from nowhere and entangled her ...