Utricularia malabarica is a small annual

Annual plant

An annual plant is a plant that usually germinates, flowers, and dies in a year or season. True annuals will only live longer than a year if they are prevented from setting seed...

 carnivorous plant

Carnivorous plant

Carnivorous plants are plants that derive some or most of their nutrients from trapping and consuming animals or protozoans, typically insects and other arthropods. Carnivorous plants appear adapted to grow in places where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as acidic...

 that belongs to the genus

Genus

In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

 Utricularia. It is endemic to southern India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 and has been collected from the Kasaragod district

Kasaragod district

Kasaragod District is one of the districts of the Indian state of Kerala. Kasaragod District was organised as a separate district on 24 May 1984...

. U. malabarica grows over wet rocks or lateritic

Laterite

Laterites are soil types rich in iron and aluminium, formed in hot and wet tropical areas. Nearly all laterites are rusty-red because of iron oxides. They develop by intensive and long-lasting weathering of the underlying parent rock...

 soils in the presence of Eriocaulon

Eriocaulon

Eriocaulon is a genus of about 400 species of monocotyledonous flowering plants in the family Eriocaulaceae. The genus is widely distributed, with the centers of diversity for the group occurring in tropical regions, particularly southern Asia and the Americas. A few species extend to temperate...

species and grasses. It was originally collected by M. K. Janarthanam in 1985 and was formally described by Janarthanam and Ambrose Nathaniel Henry in 1989. It is most closely related to U. lazulina

Utricularia lazulina

Utricularia lazulina is a small annual carnivorous plant that belongs to the genus Utricularia. It is endemic to an area around Mangalore, India. U. lazulina grows as a terrestrial plant in shallow wet soils over laterite or in wet grasslands. It was originally described and published by Peter...

.