{"id":436,"date":"2006-03-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-04T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/fire\/2006\/03\/04\/suffering-cacti\/"},"modified":"2007-01-13T13:45:43","modified_gmt":"2007-01-13T20:45:43","slug":"suffering-cacti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/2006\/03\/04\/suffering-cacti\/","title":{"rendered":"Suffering Cacti"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I drove through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nps.gov\/sagu\/index.htm\">Saguaro National Park East<\/a> yesterday, and because of our severe drought, I was unable to find anything blooming, even though this is normally our spring wildflower season. Instead of colorful wildflowers, there were only the strange and sickly colors of drought-stressed cacti like these <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fireflyforest.com\/flowers\/1754\/opuntia-engelmannii-cactus-apple\/\">Cactus Apples or Engelmann&#8217;s Pricklypears (Opuntia engelmannii)<\/a> and other Pricklypear <em>Opuntia<\/em> species. These cacti should be plump and green right now, but instead they are shriveled and oddly colored.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/images\/firefly\/2006\/March\/drought-cacti-orange.jpg\" alt=\"Orange drought-stressed Cactus Apple or Engelmann's Pricklypear (Opuntia engelmannii)\" title=\"Orange drought-stressed Cactus Apple or Engelmann's Pricklypear (Opuntia engelmannii)\" width=\"480\" height=\"356\" class=\"post-photo\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/images\/firefly\/2006\/March\/drought-cacti-yellow.jpg\" alt=\"Yellow drought-stressed Cactus Apple or Engelmann's Pricklypear (Opuntia engelmannii)\" title=\"Yellow drought-stressed Cactus Apple or Engelmann's Pricklypear (Opuntia engelmannii)\" width=\"480\" height=\"356\" class=\"post-photo\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/images\/firefly\/2006\/March\/drought-cacti-purple.jpg\" alt=\"Purple drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" title=\"Purple drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" width=\"356\" height=\"480\" class=\"post-photo\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/images\/firefly\/2006\/March\/drought-cacti-bicolored.jpg\" alt=\"Pink and yellow drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" title=\"Pink and yellow drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" width=\"480\" height=\"356\" class=\"post-photo\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/images\/firefly\/2006\/March\/drought-cacti-gray.jpg\" alt=\"Gray drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" title=\"Gray drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" width=\"480\" height=\"356\" class=\"post-photo\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/images\/firefly\/2006\/March\/drought-cacti-red.jpg\" alt=\"Red drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" title=\"Red drought-stressed Pricklypear (Opuntia sp.)\" width=\"356\" height=\"480\" class=\"post-photo\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/images\/firefly\/2006\/March\/drought-cacti-virus.jpg\" alt=\"Drought-stressed Cactus Apple or Engelmann's Pricklypear (Opuntia engelmannii) infected with a cactus virus\" title=\"Drought-stressed Cactus Apple or Engelmann's Pricklypear (Opuntia engelmannii) infected with a cactus virus\" width=\"480\" height=\"356\" class=\"post-photo\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Many of these drought-stricken cacti already look so sickly that I don&#8217;t know how they will survive the extreme heat of summer until the monsoon rains of July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I drove through Saguaro National Park East yesterday, and because of our severe drought, I was unable to find anything blooming, even though this is normally our spring wildflower season. Instead of colorful wildflowers, there were only the strange and sickly colors of drought-stressed cacti like these Cactus Apples or Engelmann&#8217;s Pricklypears (Opuntia engelmannii) and&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/2006\/03\/04\/suffering-cacti\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read More &rarr; <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arizona-wild-plants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fireflyforest.net\/firefly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}