Acicarpha tribuloides (madam gorgon)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Acicarpha tribuloides, photographed by Eduardo Luis Beltrocco — fig. a Eduardo Luis Beltrocco, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-12-16 / obs. 173526859

Acicarpha tribuloides, photographed by Facundo Chieffo — fig. c Facundo Chieffo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 168129473

Acicarpha tribuloides, photographed by Andrea Gantzer — fig. e Andrea Gantzer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 167168533

Acicarpha tribuloides, photographed by Germán Saigo — fig. f Germán Saigo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165367807

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Acicarpha tribuloides, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
Uruguay	URU

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 30 in flower of 30 examined

100%

Proportion of examined Acicarpha tribuloides in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	2	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	1	1	too few examined
Apr	0	0	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	8	8	100%	68% to 100%
Oct	8	8	100%	68% to 100%
Nov	7	7	100%	65% to 100%
Dec	4	4	too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Acicarpha tribuloides observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 30 of 30 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 8 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Acicarpha bonariensis (Pers.) Herter
Acicarpha laxa R.E.Fr.
Acicarpha pinnatifida Miers
Acicarpha runcinata Miers
Acicarpha tribuloides var. dentata Kuntze
Acicarpha tribuloides var. pinnatifida (Miers) Kuntze
Boopis tribuloides Spreng.
Cryptocarpha tribuloides Cass.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.