Skip to main content

Common Arizona Cacti


When referring to multiple cactus plants in the English language, some say "cactuses", others say "cacti", and a few don't change anything and just say "cactus". All are acceptable, but I prefer to say "cacti".

Cactus plants are very common in Arizona. They are specially adapted to the dry climate; some types can live through up to 10 years of drought. Their green, fleshy stems are often ribbed, making it easier to expand to hold water. The majority have sharp spines, instead of leaves; photosynthesis occurs in the stems. The spines only grow from areoles, which all cacti have.

The largest type of cactus in Arizona is the Carnegiea gigantea, or "saguaro" (suh-wah-ro). If you saw this type of cactus, you would remember it more easily than any others. It gets so tall when mature that none of the other cacti can even start to compare; mature saguaros dwarf even the tallest men.


There are many other types of cacti besides the Saguaro in Arizona, but here are the few you'd be most likely to see:

Not a pillow
Cylindropuntia bigelovii. This type of cactus is known as Teddy Bear Cholla, but don't let the name mislead you - I read that the spines are very sharp and break off of the cactus easily, so it is easy to get full of spines. Not only that, but the spines have tiny barbs on them, making their removal very painful. I was not injured by any of these, so I can't tell you first-hand; but I don't mind.




Ferocactus wislizeni. This is known as the "Arizona barrel cactus", or "fishhoook barrel cactus". Notice the wicked hooked spines.




Prickly pear cactus of the Opuntia genus. Prickly pear cacti have flattened stem segments that grow one out of the other, like chain.




See if you can identify the above cactus by yourself, just for fun! Click here to go to a cactus website where you can search for cacti by region. If you can't figure it out, check for comments below this post; I will give the solution in a few days.

For the final post in the Arizona Road Trip series, go to http://greatmst.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-journey-home.html
Labels:

Comments

  1. MathGeekDecember 7, 2013 at 8:53 PM

    The mystery cactus is a Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa, also known as "Buckhorn Cholla", "Colorado Desert Cholla", "Major Cholla", etc.

    Here's a link to some images of this type of cactus:
    http://cactiguide.com/cactus/?genus=Cylindropuntia&species=acanthocarpa

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dividing Paper Puzzle

When I was young, I would fold a sheet of letter paper in half, for origami projects. It occurred to me that the two halves looked almost the same as the whole sheet of paper - except they were smaller. I could see they weren't exactly the same shape; they were off by a little bit. But the idea stuck in my head. You can use a pen, instead of scissors, to halve the paper. Those rectangles all have the same shape, but are different sizes. One night when I was 12, I thought about my idea. I wondered if it was possible to have a sheet of paper that could be cut in half, resulting in 2 smaller versions of the same paper. That would be neat, to be able to cut a paper in half and get 2 papers that had the same exact shape. If that were possible, then you could cut  those  papers, too; and the resulting papers would have the same shape as all the other papers. You could keep cutting in half forever, and each paper, no matter how small, would have the same shape as all the others. I HAD to
6 comments
Read more

Pluto No Longer on the Horizon

This morning, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to make a flyby observation of the Pluto system. During the mission, the spacecraft captured the most detailed photographs of Pluto's surface we've ever had, and possibly ever will have. It also found many new properties including size, mass, atmosphere, and surface composition. In a period of a few hours, we discovered more about Pluto than we've found in the 85 years since Clyde Tombaugh captured its first photograph. Before After  (images credit: NASA) To complete this mission, the spacecraft flew for more than 9 years through the emptiness of space. This may sound like a long time, but it's actually amazingly quick. In fact, New Horizons set the record for the fastest speed at launch, and during the flyby, the spacecraft was moving at a rate of over 30,000 mph, or roughly 50 times the speed of sound. Picture an object twice as heavy as a grand piano moving 25 times faster than a bullet from a gun. Yikes. The man
2 comments
Read more

Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c
6 comments
Read more