That is downright weird. Prickly pears have strange ways of replicating themselves in that a green fruit is capable of putting down roots and producing pads, cloning the plant, if dislodged from the plant before the seeds are ripe, so maybe this weird fruit/pad hybrid growth is a fluke where that self-cloning ability got partially triggered while the fruit was still attached to the plant, or some developmental error in the fruit caused part of it to switch to cloning mode and react as if it were trying to regenerate the whole plant, but I’ve never seen anything like that before. Very strange, even for an Opuntia.
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That is downright weird. Prickly pears have strange ways of replicating themselves in that a green fruit is capable of putting down roots and producing pads, cloning the plant, if dislodged from the plant before the seeds are ripe, so maybe this weird fruit/pad hybrid growth is a fluke where that self-cloning ability got partially triggered while the fruit was still attached to the plant, or some developmental error in the fruit caused part of it to switch to cloning mode and react as if it were trying to regenerate the whole plant, but I’ve never seen anything like that before. Very strange, even for an Opuntia.