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Phyllanthus fluitans Müll.Arg., 1863

A floating fresh-water aquatic plant popular in water gardens and aquariums for its reddish leaves and roots.

Phyllanthus is the largest genus in the family Phyllantheae. Phyllanthus has a remarkable diversity of growth forms including annual and perennial herbaceous, arborescent, climbing, floating aquatic, pachycaulous, and phyllocladous. It has a wide variety of floral morphologies and chromosome number and has one of the widest varieties of pollen types of any plant genus. Despite their variety almost all Phyllanthus species express a specific type of growth called "phyllanthoid branching" in which the leaves on the main (vertical) plant axes are reduced to scales called "cataphylls" while leaves on the other axes—plagiotropic (horizontal), deciduous and floriferous (flower-bearing)—develop normally. Phyllanthus is distributed in all tropical and subtropical regions on Earth. Leafflower is the common name for all Phyllanthus species. The circumscription of this genus has been so confusing that in the 1990s, a major reorganization of Phyllanthus was carried out, while (as of 2007) a new reorganization based on genetic analysis is underway.

Taxonomy of Genus Phyllanthus
Phyllanthus is currently divided into ten subgenera defined by G. L. Webster in 1994 and 68 sections and sub-sections

WEBSTER, G. L. 1994. Synopsis of the genera and suprageneric taxa of Euphorbiaceae. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 81: 33–144.