A daring theft against odds, obsessed collectors waiting in the shadows to take possession of priceless — works of art?
No, works of nature.
After Hurricane Frances smashed into Florida’s southeastern coast Sept. 6, while 100-mile-an-hour winds and sheets of rain swept across deserted streets in Coral Gables, someone broke into the evacuated Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and stole 32 endangered cycads — palmlike plants descended from those that lived with dinosaurs but that may not survive collectors’ lust. Mike Maunder, director of the botanic garden, estimated that some of the individual plants might sell to collectors for $5,000 to $6,000.
One of the 21 species of cycads stolen from Fairchild, Encephalartos woodii — of which only one plant has ever been found, in 1895 in South Africa — is so rare that no female plants are known to exist and there are only about 100 male clones. Of the other species stolen, the garden has two or three specimens left for all but two. For those two species, the plants taken were the last, Maunder said.”Whoever stole those plants knew exactly what they were doing,” said Tom Broome, president of the Cycad Society and owner of the Cycad Jungle, a nursery in Polk City, Fla., “because there’s a lot of plants around there they could have stolen.”
He estimated the total take from selling the plants on the black market at $50,000 to $70,000. “That’s motivation for just about anybody,” he said.
It is far from the first botanical theft blamed on collectors’ hunger. In the late 16th Century, pioneer tulip botanist and breeder Carolus Clusius lost many of his unprecedented blooms to thieves who pillaged his garden at the University of Leiden in Holland. That plundering — carefully planned by knowledgeable thieves — was partly the source of the tulip crazes that swept the wealthy in France and Holland in the 17th Century, according to Mike Dash’s 2000 book, “Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused.” Alexandre Dumas’ 1850 novel “The Black Tulip” centered its melodrama on 17th Century attempts to steal a one-of-a-kind tulip with black petals.
Three years ago, thieves invaded the University of Georgia’s State Botanical Garden after hours and stole a patch of rare Trillium decumbens, an endangered wildflower also called trailing wakerobin, according to Shirley Berry, the garden’s assistant director.
In February 2003, 20 cycads were stolen from the Quail Botanical Gardens in Encinitas, Calif., though they were later recovered.
And the Hurricane Frances foray was the second episode of thievery from the Fairchild gardens: A nighttime raid in 2002 cost about 40 rare cycads, which never were recovered. While officials estimated the possible black-market take at $75,000, Maunder cautions that such estimates are just guesses because of the secret nature of the deals. “You don’t see these things on eBay,” he said.
From here to extinction
The illicit trade threatens rare cycads because it leaves fewer plants for scientific institutions’ propagation efforts, which may be all that stands between some species and extinction, Maunder said. The thefts are driven by what Dash calls “the desire to own the unownable.”
“Plants are incredibly fascinating, unlike some inanimate object, like collecting china,” said Susan Orlean, author of “The Orchid Thief,” an account of the fascination with rare orchids, including the thriving black market in them. The 2002 movie “Adaptation” was based on her book. “The plants that people tend to become obsessed with are the ones that are really unusual, plants that really have a character, like orchids and cycads,” she said.
Part of the attraction is the difficulty of obtaining them, she said: “It’s just human nature, I think, to strive for things that are hard. Plant collectors are persons who rise to the challenge.”
Orchid collectors may be attracted by the unearthly beauty of many species. Cycads are more plain: Most look like palm trees, though they are cone-bearing plants more closely related to pines. They are among the most ancient plants on Earth, some 300 million years old. They live in tropical and subtropical areas around the world, some in stark, bare places that would defeat other plants. Of the 297 kinds of cycads, 53 percent are threatened with extinction, according to Maunder, who is co-chairman of the Plant Conservation Committee of the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union.
In Chicago, there are at least 75 cycads, including some rare ones, at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Some are from the collection of C.J. Chamberlain, a University of Chicago botanist in the first decades of the 20th Century who explored and collected widely and wrote seminal books on the plants. The Lincoln Park Conservatory has another 25. But Adam Schwerner, director of horticulture for the Chicago Park District, said he does not know of any thefts. The cycads are kept indoors, and security guards patrol the locked conservatories at night.
Plant thieves hit much more often against plants in their habitats, where collecting without permits often is illegal. In South Africa, where many cycads are native and illegal collecting is common, conservationists are experimenting with DNA fingerprinting of baby cycads in botanical gardens in hopes of identifying poached plants. In the 1990s, South African authorities tried to track cycad thefts by inserting microchips in the plants, but thieves X-rayed plants to detect the chips.
Some plant thieves are collectors, conservation officials say. Some are dealers. Some are both.
“It’s a compulsion. It’s an obsession,” said Ken McCloud, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who went undercover among cycad dealers in an operation that resulted in the indictments of 11 men for violating customs laws in smuggling cycads and orchids in 2001.
Over-collecting — sometimes by indigenous people for sale to collectors — can be devastating to small species of wild plants, he said. In South Africa and China, entire populations of newly discovered plants have disappeared after being described in scientific literature. As a consequence, botanists have stopped including locations in their descriptions of new species, Maunder said.
The destruction of their habitats is by far the largest extinction threat to cycads, as it is to plant and animal species around the world. But the collection and sale of rare specimens contributes to the danger, conservation officials say, though no one has measured by just how much because the trade is “usually very successfully hidden,” according to Maunder.
Making of an underground
McCloud and Broome agree that black-market deals often are done on the fringes of reputable meetings of cycad societies that, like most collectors, condemn the illegal trade and promote conservation.
In fact, McCloud said his undercover investigation began when he first made contact with unscrupulous dealers at Cycad 99, an international meeting of collectors, dealers and academics in Miami co-hosted by Fairchild Botanic Garden.
Black marketeers also contact customers through the Internet or by word of mouth.
A major tool for protection of endangered cycads comes under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, an agreement among nations that came into force in 1975. Individual nations also have laws, such as the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
Under CITES, plants and animals that are considered threatened or endangered in their native environments are placed on lists that strongly restrict or forbid taking them across national borders.
However, not all collecting is illegal. Scientific institutions with permits still send expeditions into the wild, and private collectors are allowed to forage for plants not considered to be in danger. In Mexico, Maunder said, botanic gardens are overseeing a project under which local villagers raise rare cycads that are sold to collectors while protecting wild populations.
Because cycads are slow-growing and long-lived, many botanical institutions and collectors have plants that were collected before conservation laws took effect. Kew Gardens in England has specimens collected in the 1700s.
Some legitimate plant collectors criticize CITES as too broad, saddling them with burdensome permit requirements for transporting common cycads; preventing them from salvaging plants from the wild that would be destroyed by development projects; and hindering them from breeding that they say could expand the populations of near-extinct species.
Increase breeding
Broome says he hopes to help remove the motivation for thefts of rare cycads by breeding enough to make them cheap and plentiful. For example, he said, he is raising seedlings of the endangered Zamia inermis, native to Mexico, to sell for $40.
The majority of cycad dealers are “ethical nurserymen,” Maunder said. But there is a small group of connivers who “are basically specialists in getting the rare and unusual by any means they can.”
Broome said the betting in the cycad world is that the Fairchild plants were stolen for a single collector. Maunder said he has heard rumors that they were sent to Mexico or California.
Coral Gables police are still investigating the case, according to Sgt. Mike Frevola, public information sergeant.
After the 2002 theft, Fairchild upgraded its security measures, and will do so again, Maunder said. The garden was vulnerable this time because of the hurricane evacuation.
“They took advantage of us when we were at our weakest,” Frevola said.
