South Africa Is Trying to Protect its Endangered Cycads
4/13/98
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Title: South Africa Is Trying to Protect its Endangered Cycads
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Status: Copyrighted by source, contact to reprint
Date: 4/13/98
Byline: Andrew Maykuth, Inquirer Staff Writer
NGODWANA, South Africa -- Mervyn Lotter scrambled along a trail in the Berlin
State Forest, scanning the wooded slopes for cycads, an endangered plant
species as old as dinosaurs.
Two years ago, Lotter pushed through these same thorny woods near Starvation
Creek and embedded microchips in 1,400 cycads to identify each plant. Now most
of the palm-like cycads he had marke were gone -- dug up by thieves and sold to
collectors.
"All that is left are seedlings and a few old, dying plants," fumed Lotter, a
researcher for the Mpumalanga Province Parks Board. A few large plants,
hundreds of years old, were left broken and dead along the trail. Last week,
Lotter's mission was to locate the sites where two encoded cycads had grown
before they turned up 150 miles away, in the backyard of a Johannesburg
landscape artist. After locating the sites with a hand-held satellite
positioning device, Lotter photographed the craters as evidence in the
landscape artist's trial for theft of endangered plants.
Despite such high-tech efforts to protect the endangered species, conservation
officials appear to be fighting a losing battle against cycad collectors, whose
passion for the primitive species threatens to destroy the very plants they
love.
"Many collectors ardently believe what they're doing is to conserve the plants,
and they're not keen to hear what they're doing is killing them," said John
Donaldson, assistant director of conservation biology for the South African
National Botanical Institute.
Sometimes confused with palms and ferns, cycads are thick-trunked plants with
rigid spiked leaves. They were the predominant plant species during the
Jurassic period. Dinosaurs fed on cycads, and much of the coal and oil being
extracted from the earth were once a cycad forest.
Cycads were mentioned prominently last week in a report by the World
Conservation Union, which concluded that 12.5 percent of the world's seed-
producing plants and ferns -- nearly 34,000 species in all -- were threatened
with extinction.
The Nature Conservancy cites two primary threats to plants: loss of habitat and
competition from the introduction of nonnative species.
With cycads, there is an additional factor: human greed. Some cycads are worth
a lot of money. The two stolen Encephalartos laevifolius cycads found in the
Johannesburg landscaper's property were valued at about $3,000 each.
Cycads grow very slowly; some species take 100 years to grow three feet in
height. Nurseries only sell small plants, so a collector who wants a big
plant can either buy a cycad from another homeowner or get one from the wild -
generally from a smuggler.
"People in Johannesburg don't want to buy small plants," said Herman Erasmus,
head of investigations for the Mpumalanga Parks Board. "They want to be big
shots and have big plants. There's a lot of snob appeal in these things."
Traditionally, Africans have had little use for cycads. In some cultures,
people ate the starchy trunks, but they made an unappealing meal. Cycads were
mostly used as a sup plementary food source during famines.
Cycad seeds are poisonous, as numerous explorers discovered the hard way. Capt.
James Cook's discovery expedition to Australia in 1770 came to a halt after
cycad seeds made his crew violently ill.
Parks officials said that in recent years traditional herbalists had begun
pillaging cycads -- but only after cycad collectors began paying serious money
for the plants. The traditional healers, called sangomas, say the cycad
medicine creates wealth for those who use it.
Conservation officials say the biggest cause of the plundering of cycad forests
is collectors who are obsessed with owning every species.
There are 185 species of cycads in tropical and subtropical parts of Africa,
Asia, Australia, South America, Mexico and the Caribbean. International trade
in four of the 11 cycad genera is banned under the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
All 40 cycad species found in South Africa are endangered, some so rare that
they are extinct in the wild. Only a handful of one species, Encephalartos
woodii, still exist. They are all males. Botanists can produce new plants from
suckers generated from older plants, but the offspring are also male. Unable to
reproduce in the wild, the species is condemned to life as a museum piece.
In South Africa, some cycad colonies have been virtually wiped out by
collectors seeking a sample. When a botanist 12 years ago discovered a new
species, Encephalartos cerinus, thieves plundered so many of the plants they
nearly wiped out the species within weeks of its discovery.
Recently, a professor discovered a new cycad species in South Africa, though
its location is still a secret. "We've learned our lesson and we don't disclose
the location," said Hanneke Grobbelaar, chairman of the Transvaal Branch of
the South African Cycad Society and the owner of a cycad nursery.
Some homeowners have sold their cycad collections for up to $100,000. "It's an
excellent investment," Grobbelaar said. "Since cycads live for hundreds of
years, it's better to put your money in cycads than in banks."
South Africa has some of the world's strictest laws controlling cycad
trafficking. Since 1965, South Africans have needed a license to possess a
cycad. But some people claim they owned their cycads before the law went into
effect or were given old cycads by neighbors or relatives. Penalties for
possession of an unlicensed cycad were no greater than a speeding ticket.
Conservation officials have tried other means to curb thefts. Some marked rare
cycads with nails. Others tried painting or photographing cycads so the stolen
plants could be distinguished later. None of the measures was very successful,
said Donaldson, the official with the National Botanical Institute.
The latest effort has been to sink the inch-long, nail-like microchips into the
plant. The microchip gives the cycad a unique number that can be read by a
hand-held scanner. But smugglers are devising methods of finding the microchips
and digging them out.
"It's only a matter of time before they figure a way around the microchips,"
said Tommie Steyn, the Mpumalanga park official who created the investigations
unit. He said the parks board is considering taking genetic samples of its
rarest cycads, though other officials say that taking DNA fingerprints is
unrealistically expensive.
"We are trying to change the status of cycads," Steyn said. "We want them to
have the same kind of stigma as a fur coat. If somebody's got a big cycad in
his garden, the neighbors must look over the fence and say, 'Where'd you get
that thing?' "
Erasmus, the head of investigations for the parks, said cycad smugglers pay
$1,000 for a pickup truck full of plants, and there is no shortage of poor
South Africans willing to dig them up. A cycad dealer can recover the cost by
selling just one plant to a suburban gardener who wants to impress his
neighbors.
Erasmus, a beefy former game park manager, made his biggest cycad bust in 1995,
when he arrested a cycad smuggler filling two tractor-trailers with
Encephalartos altensteinii. The 40 tons of cycads were worth more than $1
million.
The thief, Konstantinos Giuleas, had obtained permission from local officials
of the African National Congress to take out the cycads. The officials
professed that they did not know the plants were endangered. Giuleas was fined
$7,500 and forfeited his truck, but the government officials weren't
prosecuted.
It was not the only time a government figure was involved in a cycad theft.
Last year, Guateng Province investigators charged a police official with
possession of cycads that came from public lands in KwaZulu-Natal Province.
Three months ago, Erasmus collared Ernie Bouwer, 52, a landscape artist who
lives in Sandton, a wealthy suburb of Johannesburg. Bouwer was caught with two
cycads that contained microchips. Investigators said eight other Laevifolius
cycads, also probably stolen from Starvation Creek, appeared to have had their
microchips removed.
Bouwer has been convicted twice of possession of unlicensed cycads, but he
received small fines, about $200. He has 1,500 cycads on his property.
This time, because investigators can prove that two of the cycads were stolen
from public lands, they are trying to build a more serious case against Bouwer
and confiscate his entire collection. He also faces 10 years in jail.
Bouwer said he is a legitimate dealer in cycads. "I buy thousands of plants
each year from other collectors," he said. "I keep the best ones for myself and
sell the rest."
He said that he did not knowingly buy stolen plants, and that his previous
convictions were entrapments. "I have more than a thousand plants on my
property, and they only found two that had microchips."
Bouwer said he did not feel he was contributing to the depletion of the species
in the environment, but was helping to propagate cycads by selling them to
private owners.
What is the appeal of owning so many cycads?
"What is the appeal of stamps to a stamp collector or coins to a coin
collector?" Bouwer said. "I love my plants."
c1998 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.