Washington students work for state cactus

OLYMPIA — The Washington State Legislature started the session with a prickly subject. “Sometimes folks think Olympia is all about the thorny issues but today was about celebrating some pretty sharp kids,” Sen. Judy Warnick, R-Moses Lake, wrote in a Jan. 28 announcement about the passing of Senate Bill 5325, designating Pediocactus nigrispinus – also called the Columbia Plateau cactus, the basalt cactus or snowball cactus – as Washington’s very own state cactus. The process began last year, when about 10 students at the Discovery Lab in Ellensburg were learning about the environment they live in. “A couple of years ago we started a project about the shrub-steppe, which is the sagebrush ecosystem,” said their teacher, Brooklynn Edgar. “And we just really fell in love with a lot of the animals of that habitat. We wanted to bring more attention to it because one of the biggest threats to those animals in the shrub-steppe is fragmentation.”