Pussytoes, Spiders, and Frogs...Oh My!
- Kirby Adams
- May 23
- 5 min read
There is no wrong way to appreciate nature, provided that your method of affection doesn’t harm the thing you love. The simplest, and arguably purest, way to fall in love with the natural world is to wallow in its beauty. Admire it for what it does to your senses. Full stop. No textbooks needed. That flower smells wonderful. That birdsong is soothing. That waterfall is beautiful.
When a patch of Field Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) started blooming a week ago, I thought to myself, “what a weird, fun, pretty little flower.” It’s about the size of a cat’s foot and is vaguely reminiscent of such in appearance. Even folks who aren’t cat people have to admit that cat paws are one of the cutest substances on Earth. That makes pussytoes an adorable plant, and that’s all you really need to know about it.
But it’s not all I really need to know about it. It’s a start, sure. But within a minute of seeing something exquisite, I pull my ecologist hat out and start asking questions. Why is it here? What’s it doing? Who eats it? How can I involve frogs in this conversation?
That last one is not actually a typical ecological query, but bear with me.
The essential lesson of nature, of ecology, is the interconnectedness of everything. No living thing exists in a vacuum. Literally, of course, but also figuratively in the grand tableau of nature. Knowing that this flower is inextricably interlaced with everything, from the scale of the field itself down to the nitrogen molecules it’s using to build its petals, elevates the beauty to something transcending a pretty flower. Thus the questions.
The soil here is dry and nutrient-poor. I haven’t done any chemical analysis or used a soil moisture meter on it. I know it because that’s where pussytoes thrives.
I remember last summer that a stunning American Painted Lady butterfly landed on some bare dirt just a couple meters away from this spot. That butterfly, in its caterpillar stage of life, loves to munch on the leaves of plants in the genus Antennaria, the pussytoes. She might have just laid some eggs on the leaves when I stumbled across her. And now we have a butterfly that is truly a work of art in the basket with our funny little cat’s paw mimic of a flower. The connections start appearing like fireflies on a summer evening. One, then two, then hundreds. But we still don’t have frogs in the mix.
Flowers that bloom early, April here in Michigan, are heavily dependent on early-flying flies and bees, and vice versa. There aren’t as many pollinators now as there are in the height of summer. I presume there have to be some small flies that enjoy this flower. More flies than bees are active this early in spring and flies have eyesight better suited to white flowers. (Moths do too, and I bet these flowers have some nocturnal visitors.) I spent a couple days looking, but didn’t see much pollinator activity on the pussytoes. Perhaps the cold spell was inhibiting them.
A couple days later I finally found a tiny pollinating fly on the pussytoes…being eaten by a spider. An Openfield Orbweaver (Araneus pratensis) was hunkered into the inflorescence of one of the more robust pussytoes, looking like it was eating something. This opened a whole new envelope of questions. Like all orbweavers, the Openfield Orbweaver is a web builder, and this particular species likes to construct webs in low vegetation. The space between the relatively bare, upright stalks of the pussytoes seems like the perfect location. Small insects coming in to feed on the flowers would be an easy catch.
The question is why this individual, a trapper rather than an ambusher, was sitting in the flower. Crab Spiders are notorious for hanging out in flowers, and have fairly good eyesight to detect movement and grab prey. Jumping Spiders also like to take advantage of the traffic around flowers, and they have some of the best eyesight in the animal kingdom. Orbweavers have pretty miserable eyesight. They are masters of sensing vibration, able to tell the instant the tiniest thing hits their web and where exactly it landed. When they catch something and wrap it up, they generally eat it right there or carry it to the center of the web where they have a better feel, literally, for what’s going on around them.
So, I’m not sure what this spider was doing, but it obviously was finding the pussytoes to be a good place to set up shop. Seeing a spider in this field always gets me thinking about Field Sparrows. A dozen meters away is a Field Sparrow nest, nestled on the ground among the straw of last year’s grasses. I’ve seen the female coming and going for a couple weeks now, and she should have some hatched babies by now. Field Sparrows really love bringing home spiders for the kids. They’ll take beetles and grasshoppers too, but this early in the year, spiders are the preferred prey, being easy to mash up and a good source of protein for growing chicks. Early-blooming flowers like the pussytoes attract flies, which attracts spiders, which makes Field Sparrow parents’ lives easier.
As Field Sparrows are producing young in this field every spring, it makes me think about Cup Plants. Later in the summer, the sparrows will be eating a lot of seeds and ravaging the Cup Plants. This ends up spreading the plants to areas along the edge of the field under spots where the sparrows carry the seeds to eat – and spill some. (Eating without hands is difficult.)
Cup Plants make me happy, because their leaves hold water from dew and rain, which provides a tiny lifesaving oasis for Gray Treefrogs when hot dry spells hit later in summer. There! We have a frog connection!
And now we’ve completed a six-degrees game for the ecology of this field. Pussytoes -> Flies -> Spiders -> Sparrows -> Cup Plants -> Frogs.
It’s more than a little fanciful to claim that a treefrog’s survival during a hot week in August depends upon a bumper crop of pussytoes in late April. Other early flowers attract flies, lots of factors affect spider abundance, and many different birds spread Cup Plants around. Thousands of other chains of ecological relationships intersect our pussytoes-to-frogs chain at every degree, and each of those intersects with thousands of others. The healthier the ecosystem, the more redundancy the web has. Invasive plants and animals, pollution, shifting climate, and all kinds of disturbance snip chains from the web, weakening it. That means every single chain matters. It means this Field Pussytoes is more than just a pretty little white flower.
I eventually stop musing about frogs. The Orbweaver has crawled away somewhere. The sparrow is quiet on her nest, while her mate sings off in the distance during the last sunlight of the day. It might frost tonight, as it often does on a clear night this early in spring. The hatchlings with their bellies full of spider parts will be warm beneath their mother’s feathers until the sun returns.
The last minute of the golden hour arrives and a few rays of amber light spill onto the patch of pussytoes. That tends to knock the ecologist hat off my head for just a moment.
It really is a pretty little flower.
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