Feb. 26, 2024
At the height of border wall construction, more than 100 saguaros were dug out of environmentally delicate areas along the U.S.-Mexico border to make room for that infrastructure. Nearly four years later, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reports as many as half of those saguaros did not survive the move. "Larger saguaros do not take well to being dug up and relocated, unless an extensive part of the root system is also carefully excavated," said plant ecologist Peter Breslin at the University of Arizona Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill.