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Pink Weed
Spigelia anthelmia
Spigelia anthelmia, the West Indian pinkroot, wormbush, or wormgrass, is a species of flowering plant in the family Loganiaceae. It is native to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Florida, and northern South America through to Bolivia and Brazil, and it has been widely introduced to other tropical locales, including western and west-central Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Hainan, and the Bismarck Archipelago. Highly poisonous, it is used as a vermifuge against intestinal worms.
It spreads its seeds through explosive dehiscence. The seeds are usually thrown more than 1 meter away.
From the article Spigelia anthelmia on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
Toxicity
Spigelia anthelmia contains spiganthine, actinidine, isoquinoline, cholines, flavonoids, tertiary alkaloids (like strychnine) and quaternary alkaloids (like ryanodine). Symptoms of ingesting Spigelia anthelmia can include dim vision, face and eye muscle spasms, lightheadedness, and convulsions. It can be fatal to children.
Due to its toxicity, it is traditionally used as a vermifuge against intestinal worms. Experiments show that Spigelia anthelmia has been found to decrease the number of worms with increasing dose in trials of rats against Nippostronglylus brasiliensis.
== References ==
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
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In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Spigelia anthelmia in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 83479.