Why do my plants insist on doing wierd things?

Well, some of my regular readers may recognize these plants... having seen them before. These are the infamous Ferocactus wislenzeni... or at least I think that's what they are... or, I thought that's what they were... I'm not 100% sure anymore.

Now, origionally, I got these just over a year ago, in the mail from an ebay seller in what had to be the absolute worst packing job ever...

There were five total... I wanted them because these plants are rather winter hardy for a Ferocactus, and they're reasonably common as a landscape plant in this area... they're also way too expensive for my small budget to buy one of any size, so I bought these seedlings, hoping that I'd eventually get them to blooming size. One I planted in the rock garden, and the other four I potted up to bring in last winter... They're all doing just fine, actually... I went out to do some basic plant stuff today, and here they were...
Now, it's fairly easy to see in the above pic, that the second from the left is putting up a little pup or offset. My reading tells me that this isn't common, but it isn't unheard of. The plant generally grows as a solitary column though... I didn't think too much of this when I noticed it this spring. It happens... and heres a close-up of it...

Then, in taking care of them... I noticed that another one was putting up pups... 2 to be exact...

Ok... that's not right... if something is uncommon, half of them shouldn't be doing it, right? So, off to the front yard... and what do you know...

The one in the rock garden is doing it too... that means out of 5 plants... thats 60% of my Fero's are doing something that they're not supposed to do...

So, the question is... Do I have some remarkable Ferocactus? or did that dweeb, in addition to packing the cactus badly, pack the wrong damned cactus? Which forces the question, what are they? The one that survived the winter seriously narrows the field. Echinocereus will survive here, and pup rather redily... after they're bigger than this... theses are really too small... Well, I don't know.

And of course, they're not putting out the hook shaped spines... I had put that down to them being still juvenile... the spines they're getting now are definitely a little different from the spines they had when they got here... so, there's a definite chance that they're not fero's or if they are, they're not wislenzeni...

But if they're not fero's, then I need to find some more, because I really really want feros.

If they are fero's, then why are they doing this? The inside ones got no water during the winter, as our winter isn't long and I wanted dormancy. They haven't gotten too much or the wrong kind of plant food, as they've gotten none that I know of... and the two that haven't pupped still may, they're noticably smaller than the other three. They may be waiting till they reach the right size...

Really, I don't need this confusion right now...