Pelecyphora dasyacantha (Big Bend foxtail cactus)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pelecyphora dasyacantha, photographed by Francisco Martínez González — fig. a Francisco Martínez González, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-04-25 / obs. 123942341

Pelecyphora dasyacantha, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. e Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 102234279

Pelecyphora dasyacantha, photographed by Leticia Jiménez Hernández — fig. g Leticia Jiménez Hernández, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 74225151

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Pelecyphora dasyacantha, 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
Mexico Northeast	MXE	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Southwest	MXS
Texas	TEX

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 81 in flower of 203 examined

13%

53%

62%

40%

Proportion of examined Pelecyphora dasyacantha in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Feb	2	16	13%	4% to 36%
Mar	1	20	5%	1% to 24%
Apr	19	36	53%	37% to 68%
May	55	89	62%	51% to 71%
Jun	4	10	40%	17% to 69%
Jul	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Aug	0	10	0%	0% to 28%
Sep	0	3	too few examined
Oct	0	4	too few examined
Nov	0	1	too few examined
Dec	0	3	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Pelecyphora dasyacantha 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. 81 of 203 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 1,597 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-3.0 °C	0.6 °C	3.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	31.0 °C	34.9 °C	38.5 °C
Annual rainfall	168 mm	248 mm	350 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	14 mm	22 mm	33 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,597 research-grade observations of Pelecyphora dasyacantha 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 22 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.

Cactus dasyacanthus (Engelm.) Kuntze
Cactus radiosus var. chloranthus (Engelm.) J.M.Coult.
Coryphantha chaffeyi (Britton & Rose) Fosberg
Coryphantha chlorantha (Engelm.) Britton & Rose
Coryphantha dasyacantha (Engelm.) Orcutt
Escobaria chaffeyi Britton & Rose
Escobaria chaffeyi f. viridiflora (Frič) Říha
Escobaria chlorantha (Engelm.) Buxb.
Escobaria dasyacantha (Engelm.) Britton & Rose
Escobaria dasyacantha subsp. chaffeyi (Britton & Rose) N.P.Taylor
Escobaria dasyacantha subsp. dasyacantha
Escobaria dasyacantha var. chaffeyi (Britton & Rose) N.P.Taylor
Escobaria fobei Frič ex A.Berger
Escobesseya dasyacantha (Engelm.) Hester
Fobea viridiflora Frič ex Boed.
Mammillaria chaffeyi (Britton & Rose) Backeb.
Mammillaria chlorantha Engelm.
Mammillaria dasyacantha Engelm.
Mammillaria radiosa f. chlorantha (Engelm.) Schelle
Mammillaria vivipara var. chlorantha (Engelm.) L.D.Benson
Neobesseya dasyacantha (Engelm.) Lodé
Neobesseya dasyacantha subsp. chaffeyi (Britton & Rose) Lodé

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol ESDA. public domain. 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.