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It looks like spaghetti, but it not the delicious pasta we all know and love. This "spaghetti" is not a good thing, and it's not a food either. This parasitic plant vampire is known as dodder. It covers lots of native plants such as buckwheat, laurel sumac, ceanothus in California.
The type of dodder located in the Santa Monica Mountains is referred to as Cuscuta californica, or California dodder. While it may look beautiful against the California sunset, in reality, it is a danger to a lot of the native plants located in the Santa Monica Mountains.
According to an article in LAist, "In the spring, each parasitic plant sprouts from rock hard seeds that’ve been waiting for warm weather. Tons of tiny vines reach out and wrap around the stems and branches of host plants. Then, microscopic straws called haustoria emerge and penetrate deep inside the host’s tissue, so the dodder can suck up water and nutrients."
No need to pull it out when you see it. It may be a parasitic plant, but it is native to the ecosystem here in California. Many wildfires are able to take care of that for us, but that doesn't mean that wildfires are any good either. However, there have not been any wildfires in the Santa Monica Mountains in a good while, which is why locals and those hiking in the mountains can see so much of it.
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