Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Highly specialized, usually succulent, many-branched shrubs, often scandent, rarely arborescent; usually spiny, the spines variable in number, size, arrangement, and color, produced from specialized axillary structures (areoles).

Stems: Stems erect, climbing, or procumbent, slender, spiny.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves absent. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary. Flowers bisexual (perfect), very rarely unisexual, actinomorphic or occasionally zygomorphic, large, funnelform, nocturnal. Outer tepals green to reddish or purplish, linear to lanceolate or narrowly oblong, 50–60 × 4.5–6 mm, margins entire; inner tepals white to pinkish, 60–75 × 12–20 mm, margins entire or denticulate. Stamens numerous, inserted in the throat of the receptacle tube; anthers dithecal, longitudinally dehiscent. Ovary inferior, very rarely superior, 3-carpellate to many-carpellate, 1-celled; ovules numerous, on parietal placentas, usually campylotropous, tuberculate, with areoles, sometimes spiny; style 1; stigma lobes 2 to numerous, papillate.

Fruit: Berries red or yellow; fleshy; ovoid; sometimes dehiscent. Seeds dull black; short; ellipsoid; verrucose.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: