The Dodder

Teacher’s Story

If Sinbad’s “Old Man of the Sea” had been also a sneak thief, then we might well liken him to dodder. There is an opportunity for an excellent moral lesson connected with the study of dodder and its underhand ways. When a plant ceases to be self-supporting, when it gets its own living from the food made by other plants for their own sustenance, it loses its own power of food-making; and the dodder is an excellent example of the inevitable punishment for “sponging” a living. The dodder has no leaves of its own for it does not need to manufacture food nor to digest it. Its dull yellow stems reach out in long tendrils, swayed by every breeze, until they come in contact with some other plant to which they at once make fast. One of these tendrils seizes its victim plant as a serpent winds its prey, except that it always winds in the same direction—it passes under from the right side and over from the left. Who knows whether the serpents are always so methodical! After dodder gets its hold, little projections appear upon its coiled stems, which look like the prolegs of a caterpillar; but they are not legs, they are suckers, worse than those of the devil-fish; for the latter uses its suckers only to hold fast its prey; but the dodder uses its suckers to penetrate the bark of its victim, and reach down to the sap channels where they may, vampirelike, suck the blood from their victims, or rather the matured sap which is flowing from the leaves to the growing points of the host plant. Not having anything else to do, dodder devotes its energies to the producing of seeds, in order to do more mischief. The species which attack clover and other farm crops seem to manage to get their seeds harvested with the rest; and the farmer who does not know how to test his clover seed for impurities, sows with it the seeds of its enemy.

The dodder flowers are small, globular and crowded together. The calyx has five lobes; the corolla is globular, with five little lobes around its margin and a stamen set in each notch. A few of the species have a four-lobed calyx and corolla; but however many the lobes, the flowers are shiftless looking and are yellowish or greenish white; despite its shiftless appearance, however, each flower manages to mature four perfectly good, plump seeds.

There are, according to Gray, nine species of dodder more or less common in America. Some of the species, among which is the flax dodder, live only upon certain other species of plant life, while others take almost anything that comes within reach. Where it flourishes, it grows so abundantly that it makes large yellow patches in fields, completely choking out the leaves of its victims.