Opuntia microdasys irritation so the plants must be treated with caution. The Latin specific epithet "microdasys" means “small and hairy”. The yellow flowers appear only rarely. Despite this, it is a very popular cactus in cultivation, partly because of the young plant’s comical resemblance to a rabbit’s head. It has gained the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit. The very closely related "Opuntia rufida" differs in having reddish-brown glochids. It occurs further north in northern Mexico, and into western Texas. Some botanists treat the two as a single species. Opuntia microdasys Opuntia microdasys (angel's-wings, bunny ears cactus, bunny cactus or polka-dot
Plant functional type Plant functional type Plant functional types (PFTs) is a system used by climatologists to classify plants according to their physical, phylogenetic and phenological characteristics as part of an overall effort to develop a vegetation model for use in land use studies and climate models. PFTs provide a finer level of modeling than biomes, which represent gross areas such as desert, savannah, deciduous forest. In creating a PFT model, areas as small as 1 km are modeled by defining the predominant plant type for that area, interpreted from satellite data or other means. For each plant functional type, a number of