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In South Africa, a botanist protects rare succulents by making them less so [1]
['Terna Gyuse']
Date: 2023-03-01 21:44:07+00:00
New markets for exotic plants are prompting a “poaching pandemic” in northwestern South Africa.
Rare succulents adapted to the arid environment are already threatened by decades of mining and other land-use change.
Pieter van Wyk has just won a Future for Nature conservation award for his work preserving the seeds of the region’s succulents.
He’s working both to preserve threatened plant species and to support local people’s cultivation of rare succulents to meet demand and reduce poaching pressure.
A “poaching pandemic” of succulent plants is underway in arid, sparsely populated Namaqualand, in the northwest of South Africa. Pieter van Wyk, one of this year’s Future for Nature conservation award winners, warns that poachers are rapidly stripping the 5,920-square-kilometer (2,286-square-mile) |Ai-|Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park of threatened plants found nowhere else on the planet.
The tiny Conophytum regale was just one of the critically endangered succulents in this UNESCO World Heritage Site that was recently been wiped out entirely in the park, van Wyk says. There are 106 different types of Conophytum, a succulent indigenous to the desert area that spans the Namibia-South Africa border and that’s distinguished by its tiny ball-like appearance.
“The species was super localized, endemic to a single habitat in northern Namaqualand, with no threats to the habitat. However with the new poaching pandemic, it got raided to extinction,” van Wyk told Mongabay over email, warning that more succulents could soon vanish as demand for the decorative plants rises in several Asian countries.
Van Wyk is curator of the Richtersveld park nursery and the new Richtersveld Desert Botanical Gardens, a project of South African National Parks (SANParks) and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) that will officially open in August 2023.
Succulents make up 80% of the Richtersveld’s plant life and have adapted to the specific desert conditions of the Richtersveld over thousands of years. Some have developed the ability to draw water from the air on misty days and others store water in their bulbous leaves, allowing them to survive periods of drought.
Namaqualand was seized first by Dutch settlers, including some of van Wyk’s own forebears, and then by the German colonizers who between 1904 and 1908 slaughtered an estimated 110,000 Indigenous Nama and Herero people.
“The [dispossession] of the Nama people from their ancestral land by establishing farms, mines and dividing Namibia and South Africa into two countries came at a big cost in the Richtersveld region, where eventually a whole population got crammed into a tiny space by the apartheid government,” van Wyk says. “While some land has been given back for the use of the communities, they are still disowned until this day from land where there is mineral riches, for mining, and live in immense poverty.”
Farming and mining have decimated at least 50 succulent populations in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, van Wyk says. He’s spent the past 10 years rescuing succulents from mining companies.
“These habitats take tens of thousands of years to establish. This gets ripped up in seconds by humans,” he says. He’s asked mining companies to secure small habitats and water them artificially in the hope of preserving tiny ecosystems that might have a chance of spreading out across surrounding areas. But only one small mine has agreed to do this work, and it has yet to begin.
Successful restoration of abandoned mine areas will cost enormous sums of money because much of the soil has been contaminated by heavy metals. The insect and bird species that complete the ecological function of the plants has also been wiped out. Van Wyk says the mining companies should be made to pay for the damage they’ve caused.
In recent years, mining has been replaced by a new threat: Poaching of succulents by organized criminal syndicates who sell these threatened plants to fast-growing markets in China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, among other countries.
Coming on the heels of the damage of the previous decades, poaching threatens to quickly wipe out many species. Mining destroyed more than 90% of habitat for the dwarf spekboom plant (Portulacaria pygmaea), for instance , and now it’s being heavily targeted by poachers.
“The species has very little chance on its own against humans with so much pressure from all sides,” van Wyk says.
He’s worked with police on 73 cases of poaching over the past two years, writing statements and spending weeks in court. After police handed back more than 100,000 confiscated succulents, van Wyk had to raise funds to set up a new net house to replant them in.
This legal work is only the latest chapter in his long history working with succulents. Van Wyk began documenting some of the hundreds of species of succulents in Namaqualand when he was just 11 years old. At 24, he was hired to work for the Richtersveld park. To keep himself busy in the evenings, van Wyk began cleaning out the park’s disused nursery.
“During 2014, I climbed all mountains in the Richtersveld national park and started to collect seeds and cuttings of plants. I saw the park’s nursery as an opportunity to grow and study some of the lineages, and to contribute to the science of species,” he says.
Van Wyk later established the Conophytum House in the botanical gardens as a gene bank for the more than 100 different types of Conophytum that exist. The house is a temperature-controlled environment in which van Wyk has reproduced dozens of Conophytum plants, some almost 100 years old, that had been collected by Sanbi.
He’s working to build up as big a collection of succulents as possible, which he plans to make available to local people as part of his new “Green Finger” project. Amid widespread poverty in Namaqualand, many people create beautiful, desert-adapted gardens around their homes.
“First prize is preserving species in situ,” van Wyk says. “I have learned that enforcing the laws does little to curb [poaching], and my motto now is: Grow them [the plants] out of trouble.”
By supporting locals propagating threatened species, he says he hopes to meet some of the demand for the rare plants, simultaneously preventing further poaching and helping to build a new “green economy” in the region.
The Green Finger project will also itself grow as many threatened succulents as possible from the plants confiscated from poachers. It will then sell these at a low cost to nurseries around Northern Cape province. Van Wyk says he’s also hopeful that the seeds from thousands of new succulent gardens will self-disperse into surrounding areas.
Van Wyk has spent 22 years recording details of more than 100 species of plants of significance to the Nama people. He’s established a small medicinal and edible garden in the park’s nursery, used for community outreach projects where children are taught the Nama names, uses and importance of the plants, which they can harvest. He’s now looking for funding to produce a booklet about these plants in Nama, and the other two newer languages of the region, Afrikaans and English.
In February, Van Wyk, now 34, was selected as one of three winners of the Future for Nature conservation award for his work in preserving the seeds of succulent plants of the region. The award comes with a prize of 50,000 euros ($53,400), which van Wyk says he’ll use to establish a new state-of-the-art greenhouse to keep 400 succulent species safe from extinction.
“I need a new specialized facility which is insect-proof and climate-controlled. These collections need to be grown securely and are of immense importance to conservation as many of them, the population of origin is already extinct due to mining and severe ongoing drought,” he says.
Van Wyk says he also plans to upgrade the seed store as the conditions that the seeds are currently being stored under aren’t adequate to keep them alive for decades to come.
“What is super important is that the gene bank we have, as well other gene banks in the form of botanical gardens or specialized collections in the world, cannot be housed at one locality,” he says. “They need to be cloned to as many localities as possible to ensure a backup, otherwise it just takes one natural disaster, or something like a war, and it can all be lost.”
Banner image: The South African National Biodiversity Insitute has listed the succulent plant Astridia Citrina as endangered due to mining and livestock over grazing. Image courtesy Future for Nature.
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