It is beautiful and long-lived, but it brings disaster to its life

Three hundred million years have passed.

Since appearing on Earth at the end of the Carboniferous period, cycads have survived three mass extinction events: the end of the Permian, the end of the Triassic, and the end of the Cretaceous. After the first two, they have regained their important position in global vegetation. Even though they lost to angiosperms in the Cenozoic Era, they survived the erratic glacial disasters of the Quaternary. Today, standing on the brink of extinction is the youngest and most diverse genus in this group - Cycas.

The reason is quite absurd: "Some people like them."

Living gymnosperms generally look like survivors: few species, great differences between different branches, and no transitional forms | Gerhard Leubner / The Seed Biology (2007)

The misfortune of beauty

There are about 100 species of Cycas in the world, of which 22-24 are native to China. Cycas plants have always been popular in the field of gardening due to their peculiar and beautiful appearance. Among them, Cycas revoluta has a long history of cultivation in my country. The ancients called it iron tree, phoenix tail banana, and fire-avoiding banana, and left behind the idiom "iron tree blooming". In terms of appearance, this species of Cycas is at the bottom of the entire genus, while the ceiling should be species with 2-3 split leaves such as C. bifida, C. multipinata, and C. debaoensis. It is not an exaggeration to call them "Gorgeous".

The bizarre leaf shape of Cycas revoluta | Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz / Wikimedia Commons

However, except for the Cycas revoluta species, which are all artificially propagated, almost all other species of Cycas revoluta are collected from the wild, and the wild population is under very serious threat. A set of data in 2003 showed that the number of wild plants of more than half of the domestic Cycas species was less than 10,000, and was still declining rapidly. 18 years have passed, and the current situation is only more serious. According to a survey by Gong Xun, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, there are only 13 Cycas multi-branched seedlings in the whole of Yunnan, all of which are in protected areas.

Current status of Cycas species | Zhou Jiemin / "Central South Forestry Survey Planning" (2003)

The only one in the entire genus Cycas that can be said to have achieved conservation results is the Panzhihua Cycas (C. panzhihuaensis), with more than 400,000 plants in existence, the largest wild cycas population in Eurasia. The Panzhihua Cycas National Nature Reserve has made an indelible contribution to this. When garden plants became popular in the 1990s, the Panzhihua Cycas was also severely stolen and dug up. At that time, vendors bought it from mountain villagers for only 8 cents per pound. In 1996, the State Council approved the special upgrade of the reserve from the municipal level to the national level, which obviously had the intention of rescue protection. However, the reserve can only manage matters within its boundaries after all. In the places outside Panzhihua in the above table, wild Panzhihua Cycas are no longer seen.

The theft and sale of cycads continues despite repeated bans

In 1999, the "National Key Protected Wild Plants List (First Batch)" was promulgated, and all species of Cycas were listed as national first-class protected plants. According to the "Regulations on the Protection of Wild Plants of the People's Republic of China", it is prohibited to collect, sell or purchase national first-class protected wild plants; collecting and selling wild Cycas plants will also violate Article 344 of the "Criminal Law" "Crime of endangering national key protected plants", and the maximum sentence is seven years.

However, the situation of wild cycads has not improved, but has become worse in recent years. One of the important reasons is that e-commerce platforms, social media and Internet communities have made illegal transactions more convenient, hidden and difficult to supervise. At this moment, Tao ０, ０ Fish and Pin ００ all have a large number of suspected wild cycads for sale, and the most rampant one is Bai ０ ０ Bar, where "Shishan Cycad Downhill Stump" and "97 Jin Debao Cycad" are blatantly written in the posts. This is only the visible part, and there may be more private transactions in various chat groups.

There are many shops that illegally sell wild cycads

Putting aside private transactions, the poor supervision of e-commerce platforms is largely due to the inability to determine whether the plants being sold are wild. my country's relevant laws and regulations do not restrict the sale of artificially bred key protected plants, so many sellers claim that their goods are not wild and bypass supervision. Artificial propagation of Cycads is indeed not difficult, especially using sucker buds for vegetative propagation, which is quite efficient; but due to its slow growth, it is impossible to grow to a large size in a few years. Therefore, if you see large, multi-headed, and multi-leafed Cycads on sale, it is basically certain that they were stolen from the wild.

Cycad cycad | Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz / Wikimedia Commons

Some people may ask, since artificial breeding is not difficult, why not breed a large number of them and put them on the market, and make all kinds of cycads cheap, and naturally no one will harm the wild population. This idea is really naive. The cycads sold at high prices now are individuals that are dozens or hundreds of years old, and artificially bred individuals also need to be planted for such a long time to have considerable ornamental value. I am afraid that no seller is willing to bear this time cost, and it is most cost-effective to dig them directly in the wild. For species with a long growth period such as cycads, the path of "using the market to promote protection" is simply not feasible. A ready-made example is the cycad species. Artificially cultivated plants are all over the streets, but the wild population distributed in the coastal areas of Fujian may have been dug to extinction.

Promoting protection with interests faces bottleneck

When it comes to artificial breeding, there are some more complicated issues. Endangered species in protected areas are patrolled by state staff, while those outside protected areas need to rely on social organizations and local community residents. The way to motivate community residents to participate in protection is to let them profit from protection. For endangered species with economic value such as cycads, residents can carry out artificial breeding while protecting wild populations, and sell seedlings for profits to feed back into protection actions.

Cycas revoluta in Chengdu Botanical Garden | Daderot / Wikimedia Commons

This logic seems to make sense, but there are still obstacles in its implementation - artificial seedlings are worthless, and as long as trading is allowed, it is impossible to avoid wild plants being mixed in and sold illegally. In this way, well-managed communities will reduce their enthusiasm for protection due to low returns; poorly managed communities, while doing artificial breeding, will not prevent people from digging up wild individuals and planting them in their own nurseries, looking for opportunities to sell them at high prices. Real conservation work is like this, full of gray areas. Perhaps only when sufficiently reliable traceability technology is developed to distinguish whether the cycads sold on the market are artificially cultivated can the sale of wild cycads be effectively banned.

Cycas revoluta | Aqiao HQ / Wikimedia Commons

Today's protagonist should be the Cycas revoluta. I originally wrote a little about it, but deleted it. In the past, when talking about plant protection, I often said that there is an urgent need for better laws and more comprehensive protection lists. The current situation of Cycas is a wake-up call, telling me that these two things are far from enough. At the same time, I kept thinking of the Encephalartos woodii in Kew Gardens. There is only one wild individual left of that tree, and all the existing individuals are asexually reproduced from it. It can be called the loneliest tree in the world. The vast majority of cycads in my country are moving closer to it, and the more beautiful they are, the faster they move closer. In this situation, it would be cruel to talk about interesting species trivia.