The genus Tacca, which includes the batflowers and arrowroot, consists of flowering plants in the order Dioscoreales, native to tropical regions of South America, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, and various Oceanic islands. In older texts, the genus was treated in its own family Taccaceae, but the 2003 APG II system incorporates it into the family Dioscoreaceae. The APG III and APG IV systems continue to include Tacca in Dioscoreaceae.
GENUS
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The genus Tacca, which includes the batflowers and arrowroot, consists of flowering plants in the order Dioscoreales, native to tropical regions of South America, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, and various Oceanic islands. In older texts, the genus was treated in its own family Taccaceae, but the 2003 APG II system incorporates it into the family Dioscoreaceae. The APG III and APG IV systems continue to include Tacca in Dioscoreaceae.
== Description == Many Tacca species have nearly black flowers, with conspicuous involucral bracts and bracteoles like whiskers. Engbert Drenth hypothesized that species of this genus attracted "carrion and dung flies" for pollination and that the fleshy seam of the seed might be attractive to ants and hence that ants might aid in seed dispersal.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).