By_Species

Trout's Notes on

Sacred Cacti 3rd Edition

Part C Cactus Alkaloids; Section 2

Our apologies that none of these links work yet. This is simply a teaser page from things to come.

The Cactus Species

Part of Woody Minach's Ariocarpus collection offered for sale in Pasadena.

The focus of the listings below is on those species that have had some nature of analysis reported.
    Many cactus species have apparently been analyzed (by workers such as Stig Agurell or one of Jerry McLaughlin's students) and found to contain no alkaloids but the details were often left unpublished.
    Many other cactus species were noted to contain an unidentified alkaloid or alkaloids. In some cases other workers took a closer look but many are still unelucidated.
    We have made very little attempt to retitle and rearrange the analytical entries to be in line with their current synonyms but we have attempted to include most of those synonyms below as conveniently linked crosslistings. This is primarily a work summarizing the published accounts concerning cactus chemistry rather than taxonomy so our use of one name or another is just as likely to reflect how they were analyzed than the current name. Our goal in organization was to make the chemical accounts accessible despite how often some of the plants have changed names.
    Purists might object to our failure to preferentially employ the current names as opposed to our listing some accepted names simply as synonyms but the reality is a strict adherance to the outcome of repeated revisions is just as likely to obscure what has been published as not. This is largely due to the huge numbers of mergers sometimes lumping up to several plants with different analytical results into one species without subspecific divisions. A number of errors already exist within the chemical literature due to some workers casually merging analytical results of what once were regarded as separate species as if any or all of the reported alkaloids can now somehow be expected from all of the larger 'species'. It is also likely to obscure some interesting patterns of shared chemistry or lack of shared chemistry within some of the former divisions.
    Call them whatever you want, this is just a summary of what we have thusfar encountered.

We encourage & welcome corrections, updates and suggestions on how to make this work more accessible.

Acharagma aguirreanum

Glass

Foster

Glass

Gymnocactus aguirreanus

Acharagma roseanum

Boedecker

Anderson

Gymnocactus roseanus

Anhalonium elongatum

S-D

Ariocarpus retusus

Anhalonium elongatus

S-D

Lee

Ariocarpus retusus

Anhalonium jourdanianum

Lewin

Anhalonium jourdanianum

Lophophora jourdaniana

Habermann

Anhalonium kotschoubeyanus

Lem

Ariocarpus kotschoubeyanus

Anhalonium lewinii

Hennings

Lophophora williamsii

Anhalonium trigonum

Web

Ariocarpus trigonus

Anhalonium williamsii

Rümpler

Lophophora diffusa

Anhalonium williamsii

Lemaire

Lophophora diffusa

Anisocereus foetidus

MacDougall

Miranda

Marshall

Pterocereus foetidus

Pachycereus gaumeri

Anisocereus gaumeri

Britton

Rose

Backeberg

Pterocereus (?) gaumeri

Pachycereus gaumeri

Aporocactus flagelliformis

Lemaire