Description: Lycopodium-like freshwater aquatic herbs with vessels in roots (adventitious) and stems; longitudinal air-channels throughout vegetative body, hairy only in leaf-axils.
Leaves simple, spirally arranged, sessile, without sheaths, narrow and often apically bifid.
Flowers solitary, bisexual, regular, terminal but apparently axillary due to sympodial stem-growth, aerial but without nectaries. Sepals 3, free, green, aestivation valvate. Petals 3, free, whitish, imbricate. Stamens 3, alternating with petals; anthers with apical pores or short slits and monosulcate pollen. Ovary superior, with 3 fused carpels, 1-locular with terminal style and 3 parietal placentas with few to many orthotropous ovules.
Fruit a loculicidal capsule (often immersed on recurved pedicel at maturity). Seeds globose to ovoid; embryo small, forming a cap on starchy proteinaceous endosperm beneath an operculum at micropylar end.
Distribution and occurrence: World: 5 species, native to tropical & subtropical America, Angola (Africa). Australia: 1 species, sparingly naturalized N.S.W., Qld.
Description matches family description- Mayaca is the sole genus in Mayacaceae.
Text by K.L.Gibbons, 18 Apr. 2023, from Mabberley, D.J. (1 May 2008), Mabberley's Plant-Book Edn. 3: 529, 932 and Heywood et al. 2007 Flowering Plant Families of the World (Kew: Surrey, U.K.); KL Wilson (Nov 2011)
Taxon concept: APG IV. Distribution and occurrence Kew Plants of the World Online, Pennay C. in 2022 Census of the Queensland Flora and Fungi 2022, [both accessed 17 Apr. 2023].
| One species in NSW: Mayaca fluviatilis |
|
