Plant in full sun. Plants require low water when established, but watering once or twice a month in summer is a good idea to keep plants healthy. Container plants need water 1-2 times a week, and maybe once a month in winter when rain hasn’t been sufficient. This species is hardy to 10°F.

We recommend watering plants in the summer when there is drought to prevent rots. During droughts plants will have natural root dye-back, and this is normal. But during extended droughts like the two year drought of 2019-2020, plants had excessive root dye-back and when the rains finally came, many plants just rotted. Many people thought that the really wet summer is what rotted the cacti, but it was the response to copious moisture coming into contact with lots of dead roots, and those rots chased up into the plants.

Flowers are very important for native bee species, though numerous other pollinators use the flowers. Fruits are eaten by birds, bats, and many other animals. Prickly pear plants provide important habitat for birds, native rodents like packrats, and numerous other animals. Larval host for the tineid moth Dyotopasta yumaella, the grass moth Dicymolomia opuntialis, the snout moth Laetilia dilatifasciella, and the grass moth Pseudoschinia elautalis.

The fruits are eaten in many forms—raw, juiced, fermented, and cooked. Prickly pear fruits are even distilled into a sort of brandy. Be careful not to consume too much prickly pear fruits/full-strength juice at once. Prickly pear juice dramatically decreases blood pressure, which is a good thing. But too much at once can give the consumer flu-like symptoms like nausea and tiredness.

Opuntia is from Latin root puncti for prickled. The specific name, aciculata, derives the Latin word acicula which means “a small pin for a headdress”, and the adjectival suffix for nouns atus, meaning possessive of or likeness to something. There are approximately 176 species currently accepted for the genus. Like most true cactus species, prickly pears are native only to the Americas. Through human action, they have since been introduced to many other areas of the world. Some people consider this species to be a variety of Opuntia englemanii.

This species grows in dry hills mainly on stony outcrops, often in small colonies usually to the exclusion of other plants in Texas and northeastern Mexico.