I love daytrips into strange new biomes.... These are from a semi-desert biome at 2200 meters; it's almost above the treeline for the area and the tallest things around are humans, opuntia, and scrubby acacias. The first one reminds me strongly of vetch (Vicia spp), but it had highly aromatic leaves that made me think of thyme for some reason.... Number two is maybe an Ipomoea? but the leaves don't seem quite right.... Number three is screaming Lantana at me, but I've never seen that arrangement of florets before. Number four is maybe a Datura of some sort? And number five is maybe also a Datura? The flowers were already partway closed by the time I arrived where they were growing, and this one had no fruiting bodies, unlike the ones in number 4. And as a note of inquiry, has anyone ever eaten the fruits off an opuntia, where both the plant and the fruit resembles a prickly-pear, but where the fruit is bloody-red inside? It was better-tasting than the regular green prickly-pear fruits, and had rather large black seeds. Thanks in advance, guys!
The only Opuntia fruit I've ever eaten were intense red-purple. Ended up with very purple fingers after peeling them! I thought purple was the normal mature colour for them - I've come across other references to purple finger stains when eating them.
Huh. In Canada as well as down here, they're green on the oustside and kind of bitter and pale inside. Maybe the fashion is to eat them underripe. I like the red ones much better.... even though I got handfulls of fine prickles when I picked them. Next time I'll take gloves; to my defense I didn't know what the biome was above Ibarra and wasn't expecting edible cacti.
Yep, could be the green ones are just under-ripe. Looking at google images for 'opuntia + fruit' gives both colours but a predominance of red/purple: http://images.google.com/images?q=opuntia+fruit The ones I had were very like the jupiterimages.com pic (second google hit when I tried - may change of course!)
I'll be darned. I always though of them as green. Thank you to those who stabbed at the ID's - it sure looks like #2 is Evolvulus, #4 is Datura stramonium, and #5 is Nicandra. What bothers me about #1 being Onobrychus is that everything I've read points to them being Eurasian in origin, while the Vicus are American. The specimen was growing in the wild; it is certainly possible that it was introduced, but why would it be? It doesn't seem to have any crop value at all, nor is it particularly ornamental. And I can't find any reference to the leaves of Onobrychus being aromatic. And what bothers me about #3 is that it's so clearly a Lantana and at the same time so clearly not due to its floret arrangement. It had the thorns, the leaves, the smell, but conical arrangement. Bah.
Thing that baffles me with Opuntia fruit, is why they have all the spines and glochids on - you'd think that would dissuade potential seed dispersal agents from performing the seed dispersal. Certainly a slow and tedious task peeling them off without getting any stuck in your fingers!
Here it's mostly birds who take care of seed dispersal for the Opuntias; obviously they can pick around the spines. And if you roll them around in the grass before you try peeling them, the spines all come off....
Might #1 possibly be a Dalea? Apparently, there are 5 species that occur in the Andes of Ecuador (if that would be at all relevant to the location). http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=201&taxon_id=109240
Re: birds dispersing opuntia seeds... Wouldn't peccaries and other mammals be feeding on cacti fruit there? Collared peccaries (javelinas) feed on both the fruit and pads of cacti in the US desert southwest (where it seems that ripe fruit are often red or purple in color) - the same species occurs through Central and South America, and is joined by a couple of other species of peccaries, apparently. (It would seem rather unlike nature if a good, rich food source such as cacti fruit went less than fully exploited...)
That would be fine and good for cacti growing in jungle biomes, but peccary don't live in the deserts here. I'll go in for the bunnies and gophers and suchwhat eating the fruits in the deserts, along with people's livestock (goats, cows, pigs, llama etc) but really the biggest mammals that occur naturally there are small deer (and I mean really small ones, think the size of german shepherds.) From what I've observed, it seems to be that the birds get first dibs.
That actually makes good sense - birds are better long-distance seed dispersers than mammals. So maybe the glochids are there to discourage inefficient dispersers, much like capsaicin in Capsicum fruit.
