Opuntia aciculata also tolerate temperatures from −5 to −12 °C. The fruits are edible and the soft pads ("nopales") can be cooked as vegetables. It also can be used to treat dyspepsia, mumps, or swelling, and in veterinary it is used to treat bruises. After burning of spines, the pads can serve as a good feed for cattle. Opuntia aciculata Opuntia aciculata, also called Chenille pricklypear, old man's whiskers, and cowboy’s red whiskers, is a perennial dicot and an attractive ornamental cactus native to Texas. It belongs to the genus "Opuntia" prickly pear cacti. It is also widespread in Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas
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