Sea Hibiscus Hibiscus tiliaceus
Sea Hibiscus is a perennial tree native to the Pacific Basin. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Hibiscus tiliaceus, commonly known as the sea hibiscus or coast cottonwood, is an evergreen species of flowering tree in the mallow family, Malvaceae, with a pantropical distribution along coastlines. It has also been introduced to Florida and New Zealand. It has been debated whether this species is native or introduced to Hawaii. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~20 caterpillar species
Hibiscus supports ~20 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 moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Hibiscus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 3 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Hibiscus is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Sea Hibiscus :
Wildlife & visitors 2 birds · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Sea Hibiscus — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 2 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Hibiscus →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
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 (20) 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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