This plant came up on the succulent forum chat thread... I think the plant in this picture may be misidentified. Take a look at the other photos for M. candida and you may note some differences. The plant pictured above is whitish like candida, but candida gets its color from spines more than fuzz.

@skopjecollection @DaisyI @mcvansoest Maybe one of our in-house cactiphiles can help us figure out what the Mammillaria pictured is (despite what the nearby tag may have said). We can file these images under the genus entry, but I suspect we might be able to arrive at a more specific ID.

Im thinking geminispina right now...will be back later..

Mammillaria rhodantha?

I agree it is not candida, also do not think it is geminispina, which also gets most of its white color from the spines... I do not have a solid mind's eye picture of rhodantha to evaluate that suggestion. I can look through my Mammillaria book later today and get back to this thread, but for now if I had to guess something I'd go with a particularly wooly M. parkinsonii, that is offsetting in the regular way rather than through dichotomous division.

I would go with parkinsonii except the flowers are the wrong color (or there are red/pink flowered parkinsoniis?). The radial spines seed to be reduced compared to what I would expect from geminispina (this could be a low light effect). The central spines are whiter than the red I would tend to expect from rhodantha (which would also be shorter and more numerous).

This is a very inexpert opinion based on consulting Anderson and Pilbeam books. I wish I had the answer but I'm not seeing any straightforward matches yet.

The picture I saw at whatever entry I looked at for parkinsonii had similar flower color - but with a little less wool.

I barely know anything about plants compared to you guys, but I thought I'd just pitch in and at least try to help haha. It isn't Chihuahuan Snowball Cactus (Thelocactus macdowellii) is it?

Or maybe Powderpuff Cactus (Mammillaria bocasana)

It looks SO familiar but I can't think of a name.

KFredenburg said:Or maybe Powderpuff Cactus (Mammillaria bocasana)

One has giant flowers, the other has wimpy hooked spines.

Ah, ok.

I've moved the images to the genus entry, but if anyone can come up with a convincing argument that they belong with a particular species, we can move them there.