Cactus Pear

Blackenedsabbath · Aug 18, 2019

Hello,

I found cactus pear locally and excitedly bought a few of them since beardies are supposed to love it. I was looking through some older threads on this website for how to prepare it for beardies, and came across a thread asking if it was poisonous because their dragon didnt like it at all and it looked different. The ones I got from the store look exactly like the red/green ones in this thread (viewtopic.php?f=18&t=192623).

Someone responded saying which genus of cactus the fruit should be from, but how can I tell when I just have the fruit? Has anyone bought prickly pear like this before and am I just overthinking? Lol

Thank you!

MrSpectrum · Aug 18, 2019

From it's Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opuntia#Selected_species
it appears all edible prickly pears are the same genus--Opuntia; it's the species (181 of them according to http://cactiguide.com/cactus/?start=-10&genus=Opuntia&species= ) that differ.
To identify, you could try going through the list of species on those pages to compare pics, but "Opuntia hybridizes readily between species."--Wiki. Identification may not be as simple as that.

http://www.beautifuldragons.com/Nutrition.html says prickly pear is fine for BDs.
Have you tried googling to verify that there are any species poisonous to BDs?

Blackenedsabbath · Aug 18, 2019

MrSpectrum":15pfvm1w said:
From it's Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opuntia#Selected_species
it appears all edible prickly pears are the same genus--Opuntia; it's the species (181 of them according to http://cactiguide.com/cactus/?start=-10&genus=Opuntia&species= ) that differ.
To identify, you could try going through the list of species on those pages to compare pics, but "Opuntia hybridizes readily between species."--Wiki. Identification may not be as simple as that.

http://www.beautifuldragons.com/Nutrition.html says prickly pear is fine for BDs.
Have you tried googling to verify that there are any species poisonous to BDs?

I'd assume a grocery store wouldn't sell a non-edible cactus pear, but just because humans can eat it doesn't specify for beardies.

I tried googling it a bit this morning, it listed some other types of cactus and succulents though. Nothing specific to cactus pears. I just wanted to get an idea due to that thread I came across. I'm at work right now but I will be looking into it more when I am home.

Cactus Pear

Blackenedsabbath

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MrSpectrum

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