Demand for ornamental plants is ravaging South Africa’s rare desert flora | Hacker News Reader

Demand for ornamental plants is ravaging South Africa’s rare desert flora

nationalgeographic.com

164 pointsgmays51 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20220315205410/https://www.nation...

If you want such plants, buy them in garden centers or in dedicated plant fairs, not online to suspicious vendors. Plants produced in cultivation (usually by seeds also produced on cultivated plants) are more suited to cultivation in our greenhouses than those taken in the habitat. For these, the survival rate is low, because they often fail to adapt.

If you want to know more about these fascinating small plants, here's a website dedicated to them: https://www.cactuspro.com/conophytum-lithops/ (disclaimer: I am the webmaster of cactuspro.com, but not this specific section of the site).

It is in French, made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. We strongly condemn poaching, and of course reproduce as much as possible these plants in cultivation to lower pressure on habitat plants and share with other aficionados.

Garden centers and dedicated plant stores in the US are just as guilty of bad behavior. The fame Instagram has given to succulents has bred a huge demand for cacti which is leading proprietors of these operations to raid the desert for all kinds of varieties.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/20/to-catch...

I can guarantee most of them don’t know the origins of the plants. I’ve seen so many suspicious looking succulents that are almost guaranteed to be picked from the wild.

I’ve recently started my own home initiative where I propagate my own succulents and give them out for free so that people can satisfy their succulent mania with little harm. I currently own more than 100 types of succulents which in the hindsight were probably not sourced correctly.

That’s not very dark side behavior! Any pics on the succulent farm online?

It isn't exactly a farm, more a backyard/patio full of succulents. And most of my givings have been to friends/family/acquaintances/neighbors. I've not tried it commercially or for profit, but maybe one day.

Assuming the collectors actually want cultivated plants vs. wild ones. I have to imagine to the collector there's a notable distinction.

Maybe, but I've never heard of anyone buying a wild-collected orchid from a species where commercially tissue-cultured specimens were available. Beyond the ethical question, greenhouse specimens tend to be more perfect, to carry fewer exotic pests and pathogens, and of course to be far cheaper. If such specimens were available of these Conophytums, then I'd guess almost all the illicit demand would disappear.

A few people report some success with tissue culture in that genus, e.g. (use Sci-Hub)

http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.25223/brad.n1.1983.a8

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42790034

A highly paywalled article seems to say this hasn't been commercially viable yet, though:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Inability+to+mass+produce...

Probably if demand remains high, someone will figure out a protocol and the price will come down. It would probably still take years to grow the plantlets to marketable size, though. Otherwise it looks like various nurseries are propagating them traditionally, but that will take even longer.

It does not sound like it from pre-Covid busts - some prefer stolen wild plants. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/plant-smugglers-t...

Huh, quoting:

> While they're easily cultivated from seed and grown in nurseries both in the United States and in Asia, the large, old, wild-harvested Dudleya are considered luxury items by collectors overseas and command high prices, sources said. Imperfections inflicted by the elements are a plus.

A lot of the Dudleya on Etsy sure do look irregular in a way that suggests wild collection. A few sellers claim explicitly that theirs are greenhouse-grown, and indeed have nice perfect rosettes. Most sellers are silent on the provenance of their plants.

I guess the issue hasn't gotten enough attention for markets in wealthy countries to make rules. Some basic paperwork (e.g., "seller must provide address of grower, and grower must permit audit") wouldn't eliminate demand for poached plants, but would probably decrease it by a lot.

If customers still want the irregular branched look, then that could be achieved deliberately in the greenhouse, with pruning and maybe PGRs (plant hormones). Probably at least five years from propagation to sale, though. Tissue culture lets the grower convert a single plant into an almost unlimited number of individuals very quickly, but each individual still grows at a normal rate thereafter.

Apparently there's no notable distinction - to quote from the article, "Beyond the plant’s size, there’s no way to be certain that a Conophytum for sale in a plant store didn’t come from the wild. Conos quickly “shed the battle scars of nature”—sun-weathered leaves or dirt mounds". So on one side it's hard to tell if a plant is cultivated or poached (making it easy to obfuscate the origins of poached plants), and on the other side it takes decades to grow a plant to a size which makes it valuable (so poaching becomes attractive).

Sourcing plants that are both genetically diverse and provably not the result of poaching is quickly rising to the top of my list of unsolved problems. One nursery I know of may be both (cloning poached plants). Fruit trees have so much trouble with pathogens and pests and inclement weather in part because you have an entire field full of clones of the same plant. What takes out one is going to take them all out.

I may also need to reread the rules on gathering from public lands. My memory has condensed down to 'no'.

So the problem with some fruit plants is they have to be cloned to get the fruit. For example if you plant an apple seed, chances are good that you won't get a desirable apple. You have to plant a bunch of them, wait until they develop fruit, then when you find one that is good you clone it.

Bananas are worse. All of the world's commercial plants are Cavendish bananas, and they are all clones.

Yeah. They all used to be Gros Michel (spelling), but they all died out in the 1950s due to disease.

The good news is that all apples are cider apples.

So you plant your orchard of hundreds of apple seeds, harvest them for cider, and taste them as you go along.

I’m waiting to see if my crabapples will be jelly apples, cider apples, or applesauce apples.

Something to be said for native fruits here. Usually though cultivars have double to quadruple the amount of meat, though there are exceptions in both sides.

The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

Apples are particularly bad, as they're "extreme heterozygotes". Good for avoiding pests in the wild. Bad when you want to plant more of the same tree.

I'm glad to see someone else thinking about this and probably thinking deeper about it than I did.

About 8 years ago I put some hours into the idea of responsibly sourced (genetic diversity was a secondary priority since I was focusing on the hobbyist grower rather than farming, the plan was very much to use clones but also create new seeds from time to time if possible) exotic/ornamental/carnivorous plants with the idea of it being a long term side business.

Probably more of an excuse to play with automated horticulture than it was a way to solve a global problem.

I hope someone attacks it at scale though, I would love to see that.

It’s all flown out of my head but there is a government agency that banks seeds and if you say the right things they will send you some (or you can send them some). I didn’t have any luck germinating those seeds and have since forgotten who I asked and when. Not sure if I still have the original correspondence, or how I would find it (I’m not entirely sure I recall what species I asked for, which would probably be the best search criteria).

If you poach one plant and clone hundreds of copies, your operation has a pretty low damage footprint.

It's usually against the law to take plants from places like national parks. Sometimes there's more leeway in taking things from national forests but it's probably a bad idea unless you have permission. Poaching succulent propagations is a big issue in some parks so rangers actively look for it.

I think for some even taking the fruit is a no no. I’m working in my germination skills before I start that process. With wild gathering you need to know a lot more about a plant than you need to know in order to buy it from a nursery. That’s a barrier for most.

What is it about people who claim to love something like succulents, or reptiles, or parrots, yet then knowingly pay for illegally sourced wild specimens, paying a premium if they're endangered or rare, just so that they can say they have a rare one?

Obviously, they don't love them at all, they're just weirdly obsessed. My country has issues with people capturing and smuggling endangered species, just so some collector in Asia or Europe can have a bird/lizard that other people don't have.

It's messed up.

"Conophytum pageae appeal to some collectors because they appear to have little lips. Hobbyists sometimes draw tiny faces on the plants and post the images to social media, fanning interest in China and elsewhere."

What a depressing reason to annihilate a species. Although anything to counter this is welcome, it seems a hopeless battle to address this from the poacher's end. They just keep coming back, forever, and in ever greater numbers.

You need to destroy the market. Block posts/users sharing this on social networks. China/Japan should launch national campaigns to "unteach" this behavior, and this applies to a very wide array of wildlife that is illegal to collect. Apply draconian laws (10 years in jail) to make a firm statement.

We need to fully reset our attitude on non-domesticated/exotic wildlife as collectables or pets. This trade serves nobody and destroys wildlife.

Related to this is the threat to peyote (another small succulent that takes decades to mature) from overharvesting to provide for the international demand of psychedelics.

It's arguably even worse in the case of peyote, as not only is the species under threat, but so is the culture of the indigenous people for whom it is a sacrament and an integral part of their culture.

I haven't read this article yet but one interesting part of this is Facebook. You can join any number of groups on Facebook for specific plants and plant types and there are sellers there showing off some very obviously poached plants. If you enquire with them they are sometimes only interested if you are buying hundreds of plants at a time. I also know a handful of collectors who are old and like to collect who have bought from these sellers.

I wonder if this will inadvertently preserve some rare species.

Some of those plants are really interesting. I wonder if they will clone and spread them widely (via sales)

The way these things usually work, you inadvertently preserve some, and inadvertently eradicate others. Just the nature of markets.

I am curious how many undiscovered species might just be sitting on someone's hall table.

The problem is the human population. When the human population reaches a certain threshold, especially with modern transportation and the stark disparity in incomes then every single consumption problem could be a potential catastrophe for the ecology.

Tried to read this but they want my email to continue reading the article. Maddening.

I have no problems giving out my email, potus@whitehouse.gov

I usually give an email of the domain I'm visiting, e.g., WEBMASTER@nationalgeographic.com or GET-STUFFED@nationalgeographic.com, etc.

I prefer abuse@nationalgeographic.com as that is the address you are supposed to use to notify a domain that they are unintentionally sending spam.

https://10minutemail.com/

One of the best things I've ever used on the internet

I get all my plants at Walmart, the fake ones from China. They're really cheap!

Oppression by plutocrats is forcing people into ecologically unfriendly methods for paying the rent.

I'd say it's just the nature of mankind seeking to wring every ounce of "economic" value from the biosphere as possible. The poorest people involved are probably the ones doing the picking, and it wasn't their idea, assuredly.

It's the nature of mankind to want a nice house, regular meals and lots of free time.

This "wringing" is the fetish of only an insane minority. Who unfortunately dominate the rest of us.

The insane majority has a great marketing campaign that has inflicted most of the world with lust for their standard of living, which is completely unsustainable. So we are all forced onto the same hedonistic treadmill and told it is for our own good. The machine is always tripping forward, running a little faster to keep from falling on its face. Until it can't anymore. Because you can't grow a watermelon in a light bulb.

I remember watching a documentary about the San people in southern Africa. There is a plant hoodia gordonii that grows in the arid countryside that is sought after. It can be used as an appetite suppressant but it isn't based on stimulants like ephedra. Of course anything fad or diet related means people go nuts over it and dig them all up.

I visited the San people in Namibia and it was one of the most fascinating and moving experiences of my life.

Blog / photos: http://theroadchoseme.com/the-juhoansi-living-san-museum

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9flJ0vDCHw (San bit starts at 5:00)

My previous comment was about the loss of control of their land. The plant being one of the problems.It's sad to think someone could disrupt such an ancient way of life.

Beautiful spot and people I'd like to visit there someday too.

At least they're being preserved.

It's not like they're poaching wild animals that can never reproduce.

These plants are being distributed across the globe, preserving their genetic line better than a local culture ever could, no?

> These plants are being distributed across the globe, preserving their genetic line better than a local culture ever could, no?

I don't think it's a matter of "local culture." The plants are being removed from the environment they're adapted to; most of the ones sold into different climates will probably fail to re-adapt and will die.

In that manner, it's more or less the same as live animal trafficking.

>The plants are being removed from the environment they're adapted to

Everything I have learned about seeds tells me that plants try their damndest to spread their DNA as far and wide as possible.

In a sense, flying live plants all across the world is exactly what they're hoping/living/existing for.

Plants, like every other living thing, specialize for environments. Propagation is how they test their specialization pressures. That testing tends to happen over hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

Shipping mature adult plants around the world to different climates is not the same thing as the kind of seasonal, glacial changes in specialization that they are adapted for.

> Everything I have learned about seeds tells me that plants try their damndest to spread their DNA as far and wide as possible.

This seems no less true of animals, many of which go so far as to move their entire body considerable distances to find food, mates, and suitable places to have offspring.

from what i've seen it's really hard to even reintroduce plants back into the ecosystem they were originally stolen from. typically they are extremely fragile and the shock kills them.

for example, southwestern succulents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KirP2ef1lJ0

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