Botanical History
U. inflata was first named and described by Thomas Walter in 1788. U. radiata has often been mistaken for U. inflata because of their similar morphology and overlapping distribution. In the past, U. radiata has been misidentified as U. inflata or placed at the rank of variety. U. radiata was first identified by Alvan Wentworth Chapman in 1860 as U. inflata var. minor and noted that it was "in every way smaller" than U. inflata. John Kunkel Small in 1903 was the first to elevate U. inflata var. minor to the species level under the name U. radiata. Further studies of the two taxa were mixed on how to treat them. In 1950, Merritt Lyndon Fernald treated them as two varieties of the same species while Henry Gleason considered them to be different, but allied species in 1952. In 1962, Grady Reinert and R. K. Godfrey further supported the separation of the two taxa into different species. Peter Taylor's authoritative monograph of the genus in 1989 solidified the distinctiveness of the two species.
Read more about this topic: Utricularia Inflata
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