Post Number Three in the saga of ID’ing a, to me, tricky plant. First, I give saludos to Planta for the final correct ID yesterday. I will admit that I have used another app for IDs; an ancient one that grew its A.I. way before 2020, if that makes any sense to us all who started collecting and feeding our photos to the Internet with our new 2020 plant hobby. Plus, finding an ID is part of what gets me excited about plants, so I would usually rather do my own research without A.I. 🤷🏻♂️ Because I’m now familiar with some genus and families, I’m cool with estimating the genus, I’ll just search, say, “Mammillaria + pink” and follow threads until I get an answer. Okay, the point is that it took a while and a second plant drop at a shop to see the latest shapes and sizes of Thelocactus to figure this crap out haha. This is another genus in my romantic, wild-eyed vision of seeds finding their way from Mexico to Chile to grow and evolve into Copiapoa etc. I stared at three different similar plants plus consulted images on my phone for a while at the shop until seeing one with more pronounced spines and running it by Planta haha. Got it…I believe.
