Appearance
It is a perennial plant growing to 0.3–0.9 m tall, with clustered greenish-yellow flowers with maroon highlights. It blooms from April through June.Antelope horns is a common milkweed in Central Texas. It gets its name from the follicles that resemble the horns of antelope. You can easily spot the flower clusters in open meadows. Milkweed plants are a major food source for Monarch and Queen butterfly caterpillars and as with other milkweed plants, it bleeds white latex if a stem is cut and this sap is toxic to some animals and to humans. It also makes Monarch and Queen butterflies taste bad to potential predators, a nice defense mechanism. From a distance the flowers appear as tennis-sized spheres, but they are clusters of small green, purple, and white flowers. Each flower has 5 pale green petals that cup upward around 5 prominent white hoods.
Habitat
Like several other species of milkweed, "A. asperula" is a food for monarch butterfly caterpillars. Along with being food for monarchs, the plants also contain toxic cardiac glycosides that the monarchs retain, making them unpalatable and poisonous to predators. For the same reason, "A. asperula" can be poisonous to livestock and other animals, including humans.In addition to the monarch, it is a larval host to the dogbane tiger moth, the queen butterfly, and the unexpected cycnia.
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