Erect prickly pear is a cactus native to beaches and sandy shores along the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the U.S. Outside the Americas it has become one of the world's worst invasive plants, and in Australia it was brought under control by a cactus-eating moth.
Appearance
- Appearance
- A shrubby cactus up to about 6.5 ft (2 m) tall with flat, blue-green pads. Yellowish spines grow mostly near the pad edges and tips.
- Flowers
- Single lemon-yellow to yellow-orange flowers that last only a short time and draw many pollinating insects.
- Flowering time
- Spring and summer
- Fruit
- Purple-red fruits 2.5–3.5 in (6–9 cm) long, covered in , each holding 60–180 seeds that can stay alive in soil for more than 10 years.
Look-alikes
Eastern prickly pearOpuntia humifusa
Eastern prickly pear is a low, ground-hugging cactus, while erect prickly pear stands upright and can grow head-high. Telling prickly pears apart is often hard from photos.
Why they get mixed upBoth grow on sandy East Coast shores and have yellow flowers and red-purple fruit.
Where it lives
- Typical habitats
- coastal beach scrub
- sandy coastal soils
- dunes
- Range
- Coastal South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, plus Bermuda, the Caribbean, eastern Mexico, Central America, and northern South America.
Life cycle
- Seed dispersal
- Birds and mammals eat the fruit and spread the seeds. Broken pads can also root and grow.
Cautions
- Cautions
- Besides the spines, tiny barbed bristles called glochids lodge easily in skin.
Conservation
- IUCN Red List
- LCLeast ConcernLow risk of extinction
- Status
- Listed as Threatened by the state of Florida, where it is native along the coasts. Elsewhere it is on the IUCN's list of 100 of the World's Worst Invasive Alien Species, having spread in South Africa, Kenya, Madagascar, Australia, and southern Asia.
- Threats
- The cactus moth, a South American insect once released to control this plant in Australia, turned up in Brazoria County, Texas, in 2017 and is a serious threat to native prickly pears.
More species to explore
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