FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

NO... Blake, what are you talking about? I'm talking about the moon cactus/ruby ball cactus. The pink and the green are part of the same plant. Yes you can graft different shapes and colors onto the green pillar, but the pink part is the ball cactus itself, it just has a green pillar for photosynthesis, roots, and support.

Yes I know...

Gymnocalycium mihanovichii ‘Ruby Ball’

"Gymnocalycium mihanovichii, often called chin cactus, is a species of cactus from South America commonly grown as a houseplant. The most popular cultivars are mutants which completely lack chlorophyll, exposing the underlying red, orange or yellow pigmentation. These cultivars are often called moon cactus. Since chorophyll is necessary for photosynthesis, these mutations die as seedlings unless grafted onto another cactus with normal chlorophyll."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnocalycium_mihanovichii

" The red-colored forms of this species are red because they are a mutation that lacks chlorophyll. Without chlorophyll, these plants lake the ability to turn sunlight into food and cannot survive on their own - they must be grafted onto another plant that has chlorophyll and that supplies the necessary food for the mutated red top"
http://cactiguide.com/cactus/?genus=Gym ... hanovichii

The top red part doesn't grow the base and the base does not grow the red part! It looks like they're either raised in an artificial nutrient rich environment until they are big enough to be grafted or they are taken as buds off of an already grafted from. Gymnocalycium has species that have chlorophyll, but the brightly colored ones don't.

lemonlily wrote:So it wasn't supposed to be pink? It was green, but got messed up and turned into pink?

But either way, my point is that it died because it had a hole in the bottom, and didn't have roots.

Lilly, you're right. The top part died because the bottom part got a hole in it. The top relies on the bottom for nutrients. The top part wouldn't exist in nature. There are green varieties, but the brightly colored varieties that they sell with the green base can't survive alone. The pink is just additional pigment in the cells that shows through when the chlorophyll isn't there, the lack of chlorophyll occurs because of a genetic mutation (so in a sense, yes, the cactus got "messed up and turned into pink").

Oh, okay. I thought it was pink when it grew from seeds or whatever.

Well the top part was pink when it grew from a seed, and the bottom part was green when it grew from a seed. Once the top was big enough someone (or some lab probably) smashed the two together (in a sense, they don't actually smash them...) so the bottom would generate nutrients for the top. That's what grafting is...the smashing part