Cochemiea armillata(K.Brandegee) P.B.Breslin & Majure

Los Cabos nipple cactus

WFO wfo-0001430464 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cochemiea armillata, photographed by Bill Levine
fig. a Bill Levine, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-10 / obs. 196596398

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K000062913
Filed as
Mammillaria armillata K.Brandegee
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
Hunt 1980-01-01
Origin
MX
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Flowering 57 in flower of 124 examined

Proportion of examined Cochemiea armillata in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 5 11 45% 21% to 72%
Feb 25 36 69% 53% to 82%
Mar 17 22 77% 57% to 90%
Apr 3 9 33% 12% to 65%
May 1 6 17% 3% to 56%
Jun 1 4 too few examined
Jul 1 6 17% 3% to 56%
Aug 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Sep 0 1 too few examined
Oct 0 10 0% 0% to 28%
Nov 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Dec 4 7 57% 25% to 84%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Cochemiea armillata 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. 57 of 124 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 720 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 13.0 °C 16.2 °C 18.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 28.6 °C 30.8 °C 33.8 °C
Annual rainfall 208 mm 319 mm 437 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 1 mm 2 mm 3 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 720 research-grade observations of Cochemiea armillata that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 7 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.

  • Bartschella armillata (K.Brandegee) Doweld
  • Chilita armillata Orcutt
  • Ebnerella armillata (K.Brandegee) Buxb.
  • Mammillaria armillata K.Brandegee
  • Mammillaria dioica var. armillata (K.Brandegee) Neutel.
  • Neomammillaria armillata (K.Brandegee) Britton & Rose
  • Neomammillaria lapacena H.E.Gates

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.