I notice sometimes that when somebody asks for an ID that they seem incredulous because their plant doesn't look like the one they see in the
photos elsewhere. Somebody indicated this to Alain recently, and I thought of this plant as an example of what he was saying.
Both of these plants are the same species,
Echinocereus coccinia, and both were sown from seed from
Mesa. Both were sown at the same time from the same batch if seeds, but one of them is solitary and the other one is a cluster. (All of the other seedlings were solitary.) This variance in the species can sometimes be misleading. The red on the plant is a little bit of sunburn.