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

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

Too Bright, Too Dark

The visible world around us is constantly changing. One second we may have the sun in our eyes, and another we're in a dark closet trying to find the light switch. Such fluctuations in brightness could have ended up being a serious problem for our vision if it weren't for a handy built-in feature: our eyes automatically adapt to the lighting conditions of the surrounding environment. Most people are well aware that their pupils change size to handle lighting conditions. A larger pupil admits more light and makes the scene brighter, while a smaller pupil admits less light and makes the scene dimmer. This mechanism is fast and effective, and is controlled by the brain stem, which acts autonomously - you don't even have to think about it. As useful as this type of adaptation may be, it has some limitations. For example, most artificial lighting is 20 times dimmer than the sun, while pupil dilation only brightens light by a factor of 4 (when compared with a fully constricted pu...
3 comments
Read more

2014 in Photos

The year of 2014 is over; the year of 2015 has begun. Over the past year, I took a lot of pictures - more than 1200 photos of clouds, bugs, plants, rocks, and more. I deleted most of the low-quality and repetitive photos. Then, I selected 20 of the remaining photos which I thought were the most interesting or significant. In this post, I'll include those photos, in chronological order. Spring 1. Cold Hummingbird I took this photo after a late snowstorm in Spring. In the days leading up to the storm, it was warm and sunny and the fields were green, so the snow came rather unexpectedly. During the storm, one of the hummingbirds at our feeder was covered in ice and could barely fly. This hummingbird was more fortunate, but unlucky nevertheless. 2. Green Landscape I took this photo on the side of a biking trail. I didn't edit or crop the photo - this is how it looked. 3. Indian Paintbrush The Indian Paintbrush is an unusual flower. What appear to be flower petals are actually brigh...
Post a Comment
Read more