Southwestern Barrel Cactus Flowers in November (Ferocactus wislizeni). Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve, Las Vegas
This is the third in a series of posts on carbon fixation in Mohave desert plants. In this post we will focus on plants that use CAM carbon fixation which includes cactus, yucca and agave. The most important benefit of CAM to plants is the ability to leave most leaf stomata closed during the day. Plants employing CAM are most common in arid environments, where water comes at a premium. Being able to keep stomata closed during the hottest and driest part of the day reduces the loss of water through evaporation and transpiration, allowing such plants to grow in environments that would otherwise be far too dry. Plants using only C3 carbon fixation, for example, lose 97% of the water they take up through the roots to transpiration – a high cost avoided by plants able to employ CAM. The Mojave Desert is the northernmost “hot desert” in North America and essentially a transition land between the Great Basin and Sonoran. It’s the smallest of the Big Four, covering some 54,000 square miles of southeastern California, southern Nevada, and itty-bitty strips of southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona. Roughly speaking, the Great Basin Desert yields to the Mojave at the northern range limit of creosote bush, the defining shrub of North America’s hot deserts; its distribution essentially outlines them. You can rightly think of it as the hot-desert equivalent of big sagebrush. But the trademark plant of the Mojave, the one whose geography basically maps out this desert, is the Joshua-Tree. This outsized yucca actually flourishes best on the Mojave margins, reaching peak development on middle slopes of foothills and bajadas. Interestingly, the Joshua-Tree uses C3 carbon fixation while most of the remaining yucca and agave use CAM carbon fixation, along with all of the cactus species.
