name: Ostrich Fern

flavor_db_name_variants: ostrich fern

source: foodb

status: draft

food_db_id: Ostrich fern

id: 556

name_scientific: Matteuccia struthiopteris

description: Matteuccia struthiopteris (common names ostrich fern or shuttlecock fern) is a crown-forming, colony-forming fern, occurring in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere in eastern and northern Europe, northern Asia and northern North America. The species epithet struthiopteris comes from Ancient Greek words, struthio meaning ostrich and pterion meaning wing. It grows from a completely vertical crown, favoring riverbanks and sandbars, but sends out lateral stolons to form new crowns. It thus can form dense colonies resistant to destruction by floodwaters. The fronds are dimorphic, with the deciduous green sterile fronds being almost vertical, 100?170 cm (39?67 in) tall and 20?35 cm (7.9?13.8 in) broad, long-tapering to the base but short-tapering to the tip, so that they resemble ostrich plumes, hence the name. The fertile fronds are shorter, 40?60 cm (16?24 in) long, brown when ripe, with highly modified and constricted leaf tissue curled over the sporangia; they develop in autumn, persist erect over the winter and release the spores in early spring. Matteuccia species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Sthenopis auratus.

itis_id: 17596

wikipedia_id: Ostrich_fern

picture_file_name: 570.jpg

picture_content_type: image/jpeg

picture_file_size: 84015

picture_updated_at: 2012-04-23T10:43:12.000Z

legacy_id: 597

food_group: Vegetables

food_subgroup: Leaf vegetables

food_type: Type 1

created_at: 2011-02-09T00:37:49.000Z

updated_at: 2019-05-14T18:05:27.000Z

creator_id: null

updater_id: 2

export_to_afcdb: false

category: specific

ncbi_taxonomy_id: 3277

export_to_foodb: true

public_id: FOOD00556