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Comment by yann63 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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