Mediterranean Stork's Bill Erodium malacoides
Mediterranean Stork's Bill is an introduced annual herb, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.3 ft and blooms Mar – May.
More about this plant
Erodium malacoides is a species of flowering plant in the geranium family known by the common names mallow-leaved stork's bill, Mediterranean stork's bill, and soft stork's-bill. It is an annual or biennial herb which is native to the Mediterranean region in southern Europe, northern Africa, and southwest Asia. It can be found locally elsewhere is an introduced species. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 1.3 ft
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~3 caterpillar species
Erodium supports ~3 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Erodium in North America, including:
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 20 bee visitors
20 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Mediterranean Stork's Bill — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Mediterranean Stork's Bill — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Erodium →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
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 (22) 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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