Crossword clues for epiphyte
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Epiphyte \Ep"i*phyte\, n. [Gr. 'epi` upon + fyto`n plant, ? to grow: cf. F. ['e]piphyte.]
(Bot.) An air plant which grows on other plants, but does not derive its nourishment from them. See Air plant.
(Med.) A vegetable parasite growing on the surface of the body.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"plant which grows upon another plant," 1827, from epi- "upon" + -phyte "plant." Related: Epiphytal; epiphytous (1816).
Wiktionary
n. (context botany English) A plant that grows on another, using it for physical support but obtaining no nutrients from it and neither causing damage nor offering benefit; an air plant.
WordNet
n. plant that derives moisture and nutrients from the air and rain; usually grows on another plant but not parasitic on it [syn: air plant, aerophyte, epiphytic plant]
Wikipedia
An epiphyte is a plant that grows harmlessly upon another plant (such as a tree) and derives its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, and sometimes from debris accumulating around it. Epiphytes differ from parasites in that epiphytes grow on other plants for physical support and do not necessarily negatively affect the host. An epiphytic organism that is not a plant is called an epibiont. Epiphytes are usually found in the temperate zone (e.g., many mosses, liverworts, lichens, and algae) or in the tropics (e.g., many ferns, cacti, orchids, and bromeliads). Many houseplants are epiphyte species due to their minimal water and soil requirements. Epiphytes provide a rich and diverse habitat for other organisms including animals, fungi, bacteria, and myxomycetes.
Epiphyte is one of the subdivisions of the Raunkiær system.
The term epiphytic derives from the Greek epi- (meaning 'upon') and phyton (meaning 'plant'). Epiphytic plants are sometimes called "air plants" because they do not root in soil. However, there are many aquatic species of algae, including seaweeds, that are epiphytes on other aquatic plants (seaweeds or aquatic angiosperms).
Usage examples of "epiphyte".
And lower down the great forest trees arch over it, and the sunbeams trickle through them, and dance in many a quiet pool, turning the far-down sands to gold, brightening majestic tree-ferns, and shining on the fragile polypodium tamariscinum which clings tremblingly to the branches of the graceful waringhan, on a beautiful lygodium which adorns the uncouth trunk of an artocarpus, on glossy ginger-worts and trailing yams, on climbers and epiphytes, and on gigantic lianas which, climbing to the tops of the tallest trees, descend in vast festoons, many of them with orange and scarlet flowers and fruitage, passing from tree to tree, and interlacing the forest with a living network, while selaginellas and lindsayas, and film ferns, and trichomanes radicans drape the rocks in feathery green, along with mosses scarcely distinguishable from ferns.
The prickles were interesting though, being an epiphyte with the damndest set of equipment for clinging to bare rock you ever saw.
As I mentioned, one of my graduate students was describing Ulva morina and its epiphytes.
It would be caught and trapped along the way by expansive bromeliads, enterprising epiphytes, aerial roots, and thirsty fauna.
If such a contract had specified a fifty-fifty split, then x would be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other frictional effects of the real world.
Best to play one's cards close to the vest, let Kepler wonder whether Epiphyte Corp.
Fully awake, he took in the enveloping hylaea, the glistening arboreals, the brilliant-hued flowers, the vines and lianas and epiphytes and symbiotes.
It lay amidst a cluster of epiphytes bright with tiny white flowers whose petals had closed for the night.
As a third figure came ambling out of the dense vegetation that lay in the direction of the trunk, the motionless form abed in the black-flowering epiphytes rolled to its feet.
Fully awake, he took in the enveloping hylaea, the glistening arboreals, the brilliant hued flowers, the vines and lianas and epiphytes and symbiotes.
As a third figure came ambling out of the dense vegetation that lay in the direction of the trunk, the motionless form abed in the black flowering epiphytes rolled to its feet.
Even before the frantic Sailings of legs and tentacles ceased, the first row had been shoved aside and tumbled and bounced off branches and epiphytes into the depths below.
Thousands of Yuuzhan Vong of unknown caste clambered up and down and across these walls, festooning them with brilliantly colored epiphytes and flowering vines, hanging living cages and nests occupied by a bewildering variety of creatures so alien Ganner couldn't even really see them clearly: his eyes kept trying to interpret them as insects or reptiles, rodents or felines or some other type of animal with which he was already familiar, when these were really nothing like anything he'd ever seen before.
I'm merely pointing out that they are all interconnected, both by the root-node linkage and by your green epiphytes in the branches.
He remembered the fantastic profusion of plant life, everything sprouting and uncoiling almost while one watched, and yet somehow oddly disciplined, everything fitting into well-defined layers - the towering slender trees bare of branches for seven eighths of their height, then flaring out into great umbrellas of leaves tied together into a tight canopy by a tangle of vines and creepers and epiphytes, and under that a level of shorter, rounder, fuller, more shade-tolerant trees, and a stratum of clumping shrubbery below that, and then the forest floor, dark, mysterious, all but barren, a stark expanse of damp thin spongy soil that bounced jauntily underfoot.