The Prickly Pear Cactus

Have you seen these plants growing somewhere in your neighborhood? Called Paddle Cactus in English and Nopales in Spanish, this plant produces red fruit that gets ripe in the autumn. The fruit is called the prickly pear in English and tuna in Spanish. Have you ever eaten the "paddles?" Nopales are cut into strips are cubes and can be used like potatoes. You can fry them, dice them for a salad, or make stew or soup. Mmmmmm, tasty! Also, you can eat the fruit. You can turn the juice into frozen sorbet, or pour it into beverages, or make it into jelly and candy!

The prickly pear fruit and cactus show us that animals need plants and plants need animals. The prickly pear starts out as a flower. Bees go to the flower to get nectar to make honey. Pollen on the bees' legs goes into the flower and makes a fruit start to grow. The fruit starts out green and then gets ripe and turns red.
Humans and other animals know when the fruit is red, it is delicious. See the first picture? See the fruit and the seeds laying around it? Can you guess which animal ate the prickly pear? Do you think it was a coyote or maybe a pack rat or a jack rabbit? When the animal eats the fruit, it swallows the seeds, too. What happens to the seeds? They wind up in the animal's poop! Ooooh, icky, I know. But it is true. And this is how the seeds get "dispersed," or spread out over the land. Then these seeds turn into new cactus plants. Animals use these large cactus plants for shelter. A coyote cannot catch a bunny or a snake if it is hiding in a cactus patch. So here we see that the cactus needs animals, and the animals need the cactus. If you were an animal, under which fruit tree or bush would you live?

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