Salt Marsh Dodder is a parasitic plant, wrapping orange-colored stems around natural wetland vegetation and absorbing nutrients of host plants via their specialized structures called haustoria.

Cuscuta salina is a slender annual vine extending yellowish thready stems to wrap tightly around other plants of the sunflower family, notably Jaumea carnosa in an ecological mutualistic relationship.

Salt Marsh Dodder flowers are white glandular corollas.

In 2009, two of them were combined into a separate species called Cuscuta pacifica.

[1] The two species can easily be differentiated by habitat geography: the varieties of Cuscuta pacifica grow solely in coastal habitats while Cuscuta salina sensu stricto grows inland in alkaline or saline seasonally wet habitats such as vernal pools and salt flats, such as the margins of the Great Salt Lake.