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Thus I decided to show the photographs of this odd bud several people more qualified than me in biology.
I sent an e-mail to Fabrice Cendrin (the heuristic Cactus, le Cactus Heuritique, link at the bottom of the article) to ask him what he thought about this phenomenon. Fabrice answered:
“The transformation of some parts of a plant or an animal could be compared to a network of railways with junctions provided with railroad switches.
According to the external stimuli the railroad switch can guide on a way or another”.
Fabrice also told me that the phenomenon was frequent in the case of more primitive plants, in particular Opuntia, whose floral buds were often transformed into vegetative buds.
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To get back to my Hatiora, I had also sent my photographs to Eckhard Meier whose answer went in the same direction as Fabrice's. He namely told me:
“The floral buds, like the vegetative buds, are formed for most cacti at the same place: areolas (except some geniuses like Mammillaria). I observed several times in my collection the same phenomenon as on yours, occurring on several geniuses of cacti, including epiphytic cacti. What, at the beginning, appears to be a normal floral bud, evolves to give a new stem, sometimes having an abnormal form at the beginning, and becoming normal later. I think that the reason must be sought in a brutal change of the conditions of cultivation, for example when the temperatures increase suddenly and that, simultaneously, the plant receives a (too much) great quantity of fertilizer. Then the plant “decides” to develop stems instead of blooming, which, moreover, requires more energy (heat + fertilizer). All this is only personal assumptions”.
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