Rare and endangered cycads, often referred to as living fossils, are being stolen in South Africa at an alarming rate, with at least two species from Limpopo province having disappeared altogether.
The thefts are not confined to the wild populations. According to the National Botanical Institute (NBI), botanical gardens are also being targeted.
In its annual report, tabled in parliament yesterday, the institute said the numbers of these rare plants "continue to decline in the wild and to disappear from national collections", despite "substantial efforts" to conserve them.
Asked to comment, the NBI's John Donaldson, chair of the Cycad Specialist Group, said even the institute's flagship Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden had lost a cycad to thieves.
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Collectors paid up to $20 000 for an Albany cycad This was a rare Albany cycad, large enough for the thieves to have needed at least a wheelbarrow to remove from the garden.
The Lowveld National Botanical Garden had "lost quite a few cycads over the past few years", Donaldson said.
The rate of decline of some species of cycad in the wild was "substantial".
A helicopter survey in Limpopo province during the 1980s had recorded 700 specimens of one species. When researchers repeated the survey recently, using the same counting method, only 100 remained.
Two other species, one of them endemic to the region, had disappeared from the province.
Donaldson said poachers in the Eastern Cape had halved the number of Albany cycads in the wild over the past 10 years to about 50.
In the United States, collectors paid up to $20 000 for an Albany cycad.
Asked if the electronic identification chip inserted into many wild cycads in recent years had not made collectors hesitant to steal the plants, Donaldson said such measures were "only as good as the law enforcement".
"So much money is being made, the poachers have worked out a way to get the chips out. I've heard they even X-ray the plants to find the chip and dig it out."
South Africa's cycads had existed, little changed, since 30 to 40 million years ago, Donaldson said.
According to the NBI report, a technique has been developed to "fingerprint" the DNA of cycads and so improve law enforcement.
In a year in which the number of people visiting the country's eight national gardens rose to 1 134 908, Kirstenbosch had a record 686 210 visitors, the report said.
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This article was originally published on page 4 of Cape Times on August 31, 2004
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