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Scientists Turn To Technology To Save South African Cycads

Scientists Turn To Technology To Save South African Cycads

While habitat loss is usually the reason for cycads disappearing around the world, in South Africa, it’s theft, CCTV reports.

Living fossils, the hardy, palm-like cycads have been around for 250 million years, surviving several mass extinctions including one that finished off dinosaurs and others that killed half the plant species on Earth. But will they survive humans?

The history and rarity of cycads makes them sought after by collectors and thieves. Now scientists are using microdot technology to prevent South African cycads from disappearing completely, CCTV reports.

Microdots are a high-tech intervention considered essential for these ancient plants after poachers stole about dozens of them from Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town in 2014, IndependentOnline reported. Among those stolen was the critically endangered Albany cycads, almost extinct in the wild.

There’s been about a 50-percent decline in cycads the last 15 years, according to cycad expert John Donaldson, CCTV reported. Most of that is due to collecting.

“We’ve seen a limited amount of habitat loss, a limited amount of invasive species and by far the majority ….. individual plants have disappeared from those landscapes,” he said.

Cycads are being marked by microdots, each about 1 millimeter (four hundredths of an inch) in size, which have individual identity codes marking them that show the plants come from Kirstenbosch.

These microdots, similar to those used to prevent vehicle theft, are sprayed onto the plants — about 100 or more on each plant, according to IOL.

Microchip implants have been tried before on  Kirstenbosch cycads, but that method was abandoned because they were easy to find with metal detectors.

Kirstenbosch staff started a cycad microdotting pilot project about three years ago in the gardens and in the wild, horticulturist and cycad curator Phakamani Xaba said in a February IOL report. However, it has since become a full-blown project.

Experts say they want a moratorium on all South African trade in cycads until there are better controls in place to save the prehistoric plants, CCTV reports.

South Africa is one of the world centers of cycad diversity, with 39 species, according to the South Africa National Biodiversity Institute. It is also a global hotspot for threatened cycads with 68 percent of the country’s cycads threatened with extinction. Three of the world’s four cycad species classified as extinct in the wild came from South Africa. Two of them became extinct between 2003 and 2010.