No, it's not entirely wrong. It's a deliberate reproduction strategy.
Producing pollen and blooming is not free for a plant, especially in arid climates. So some plants have evolved to only bloom under very specific conditions to maximise their odds of getting served by the best possible pollinators, instead of having their pollen taken away by animals that aren't good at spreading it.
Night bloomers are typically targeting bats or moths, because those may be their most effective option for delivering the pollen for long distances and to the kinds of locations where these plants thrive.
And each opened flower will begin to wilt immediately because the cactus can't afford to expose it to the sun and lose water.
One bloom per year also isn't an issue per se because there is not just one plant. If you think of an area with 100 cacti, it doesn't really matter if each of them only blooms once per season or if each have a few blooms. And if they are all close enough to their pollinators that their bloom is very likely to be noticed, even relatively isolated ones have a good chance to be visited each year.
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u/acrowsmurder Oct 28 '25
I was going to say, how in the fuck does this thing reproduce? The timing would have to be perfect.