The dodder contains no chlorophyll and instead absorbs food through haustoria; these are rootlike organs that penetrate the tissue of a host plant and may kill it.
The slender, stringlike stems of the dodder may be yellow, orange, pink, or brown in colour.
This mutant of the flax dodder is now cultivated and spread by growers, despite being against their interests.
Given that dodder species have little to no chlorophyll with which to make their own nutrients, it is crucial for young seedlings to find a host before they run out of the energy supplied by their seeds (usually about 5-10 days).
Among the more important ones are mistletoe, dodder, and witchweed.
After growing in a few spirals around one host shoot, the dodder finds its way to another, and it continues to twine and branch until it resembles a fine, densely tangled web of thin stems enveloping the host plant.
Like dodder, dwarf mistletoes employ haustoria to exploit their hosts' vascular tissues and do little to no photosynthesis of their own.
Meanwhile, the root of the dodder rots away after stem contact has been made with a host plant.
An example of a holoparasite with such features is dodder (Cuscuta), which during vegetative growth has no roots and only scale leaves and therefore appears to be simply a yellow or orange stem with a network of host connections.
Similarly, the threadlike shoot of the generalist dodder seedling, a stem parasite, elongates and uses information about the colour of the host and volatile chemicals it produces in order to orient growth toward the host; once the shoot has reached the host plant, it coils and forms haustorial connections.
The flax dodder (Cuscuta epilinum), for example, which grows as a creeper around flax and linseed plants and damages them, originally had small seeds that could be easily separated from the larger flax seeds.
