Rocky Mountain Pussytoes Antennaria media
Rocky Mountain Pussytoes is a perennial wildflower native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It blooms Jul – Aug. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Antennaria media is a North American species of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae known by the common name Rocky Mountain pussytoes. It is native to western Canada and the Western United States from Alaska and Yukon Territory to California to New Mexico. It grows in cold Arctic and alpine regions, either at high latitudes in the Arctic or at high elevations in the mountains. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 6 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~6 caterpillar species
Antennaria supports ~6 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Antennaria in North America, including:
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Antennaria is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Rocky Mountain Pussytoes — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Antennaria →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (19) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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