Opuntia cochenillifera (cochineal nopal cactus)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Opuntia cochenillifera, photographed by Maria Janeiro — fig. a Maria Janeiro, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-29 / obs. 195067157

Opuntia cochenillifera, photographed by SiphonophoreSlinger — fig. b SiphonophoreSlinger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182749945

Opuntia cochenillifera, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology — fig. c Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / obs. 180581868

Opuntia cochenillifera, photographed by Francisco Farriols Sarabia — fig. d Francisco Farriols Sarabia, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180380938

Opuntia cochenillifera, photographed by Aitor — fig. h Aitor, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172299112

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Opuntia cochenillifera, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 189 in flower of 322 examined

50%

60%

73%

66%

49%

75%

67%

82%

44%

33%

47%

53%

Proportion of examined Opuntia cochenillifera in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	13	26	50%	32% to 68%
Feb	33	55	60%	47% to 72%
Mar	35	48	73%	59% to 83%
Apr	31	47	66%	52% to 78%
May	17	35	49%	33% to 64%
Jun	9	12	75%	47% to 91%
Jul	6	9	67%	35% to 88%
Aug	9	11	82%	52% to 95%
Sep	8	18	44%	25% to 66%
Oct	4	12	33%	14% to 61%
Nov	14	30	47%	30% to 64%
Dec	10	19	53%	32% to 73%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Opuntia cochenillifera observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 189 of 322 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,990 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	7.5 °C	16.9 °C	24.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.8 °C	29.8 °C	35.3 °C
Annual rainfall	475 mm	1,353 mm	3,153 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	6 mm	108 mm	353 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,990 research-grade observations of Opuntia cochenillifera that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 14 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Cactus campechianus Lancry
Cactus campechianus Thierry
Cactus cochenillifer L.
Cactus subinermis Link ex Steud.
Nopalea brittonii Houghton
Nopalea brittonii var. variegata Houghton
Nopalea coccifera Lem.
Nopalea cochenillifera (L.) Salm-Dyck
Nopalea nuda Backeb.
Opuntia coccinellifera Steud.
Opuntia cochenillifera DC.
Opuntia cochinelifera (L.) Mill.
Opuntia magnifolia Noronha
Opuntia nuda (Backeb.) G.D.Rowley

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol OPCO4. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.