Prairie Blazing Star (Prairie Gayfeather)

Many types of insects visit blazing stars for food. Monarch butterflies are a famous example, but a wide variety of other butterflies, skippers, bees, beetles, flies, and other insects collect pollen or nectar. Aphids and other sap-suckers drink the plant juices with their strawlike bills. Many herbivorous insects chew on or bore into the leaves, flowers, stems, rootstocks, or other plant parts. Some are specialized to eat only blazing stars.

Blazing stars are the host plants for some nifty species of noctuid flower moths. Flower moths are named because their caterpillars eat the flower buds and developing seeds of their host plants. The females deposit eggs onto the host plants. The beautifully pink bleeding flower moth (Schinia sanguinea) is limited to Liatris species and can survive on nothing else. The caterpillars are rosy pink to camouflage them against their pink-flowering larval food plants. The adults are also rosy pink to camouflage them against the flowers as they rest and deposit eggs on these flowers. Caterpillars of the three-lined flower moth, S. trifascia, also feed on a variety of plants in the eupatorium tribe, including false boneset, Joe-Pye weeds, and blazing stars.

In addition to the many insects that feed on the plants, other animals are attracted to blazing stars in order to hunt the herbivores (and each other): lady bugs, robber flies, mantises, assassin bugs, crab spiders, and more. Birds come to eat nearly any of the insects and spiders they can find.

Birds eat the fruits of blazing stars, which are like tiny sunflower seeds.

Mammals that eat blazing star foliage include rabbits, woodchuck, and deer. The sweet, thickened rootstocks are relished by voles and other herbivorous mammals.

Blazing stars are an important (and showy) part of the complex community of plants in the tallgrass prairie. When trying to convince people to take action to conserve habitats, conservationists often point to so-called poster species. These are exceptionally beautiful or charismatic plants and animals that people love. They become symbols of the habitat. Prairie blazing star is one of the favorite poster species for tallgrass prairie conservation.

Many native prairie plants have roots that penetrate deep into the soil, and blazing stars are no exception. Prairie blazing star is an excellent example: its roots can easily reach 10 to 12 feet below the surface! This enables the plants to reach life-giving moisture and survive in hot, dry, competitive environments. Over thousands of years, the presence of countless deep-rooted prairie plants built up the rich, fertile soils of the Great Plains. Before European settlement, more than a third of Missouri was covered by native tallgrass prairie.

Deep-rooted, perennial plants like blazing stars are incredibly important for stabilizing soils against erosion caused by rains, floods, winds, and more. For thousands of years, native prairies thrived despite occasional intensive trampling and grazing by vast, roaming herds of bison and occasional fires set by lightning or by Native Americans. Plowing the prairies for row crops — and eliminating the super-tough, feet-thick thatch of native prairie roots and sod — created conditions that led to the devastating Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Prairie blazing star was involved in Missouri's apparent loss of our last known native population of dense blazing star. The only known Missouri native site for dense blazing star was at an upland prairie in Oregon County, near Bardley, Missouri (close to the border with Arkansas). Although that population of dense blazing star lived there in the 1930s, prairie blazing star has become common at the site, and the two species have hybridized extensively. At this point, genetically pure dense blazing star apparently no longer exists there. Thus as a Missouri species of conservation concern, dense blazing star, Liatris spicata, is listed as extirpated.