Florida bristle fern

Plants on rock or epiphytic. Stems long-creeping, threadlike, bearing scattered leaves, covered with dark hairs of 2 types, 2-celled glandular hairs and elongate rhizoidlike hairs; roots absent. Leaves round to oblanceolate, simple or irregularly lobed at apices, 5--10 × 2--9 mm, with dark stellate hairs on margin and 2-celled glandular hairs on petioles and veins; petioles shorter than blades. Venation repeatedly forking from the base with few unconnected false veins. Soral involucres 1--6 per blade, terminal on blades, long-conic, flaring at mouth; involucre lips inconspicuously dark edged. Gametophytes composed entirely of branched filaments. Gemmae composed of short filaments of undifferentiated cells. 2 n = 68.

On rock in limestone sinks, rarely epiphytic on trunks and roots of trees in limestone sinks; 0--100 m; Fla.

Some early authors listed Trichomanes sphenoides Kunze as occurring in Florida. J. G. Wessels Boer (1962), however, reduced T . sphenoides to T . punctatum subsp. sphenoides , which occurs in the Greater Antilles, Central America, and western South America, and considered all the Florida material to be the endemic T . punctatum subsp. floridanum .