Four cacti in our conservatory carry holoparasitic plants inside them which have flowered or are still flowering this year. They appear to be two species. Can anybody answer these questions:
- which species are they? (We have photos and have collected seeds from one)
- what damage are they doing to the cacti?
- by which means can they spread to other cactus specimens?
- should we remove them by destroying the specimens?
There is a site devoted to parasitic plants: https://parasiticplants.siu.edu
It may have some information about this case.
No es una planta parásita. Son las flores en que el estigma madura primero y sobresale del pimpollo.
Thank you both for your responses. Eduardo seems to be right ( writing in English of French would have been easier for me)- I am not a botanist and was totally baffled when these structures came out. But yeah, they look like the stigmata of the proper flowers, and on one plant they actually produced seeds, what the proper flowers never do. I attach two pictures of one plant which has a proper flower (near the top) and a lone stigma (near the ground, arrow) at the same time, plus one photo of the flowers as we knew them so far.
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