The Cycads

The mounting interest in cycads has resulted in the plants becoming popular subjects of research, collecting, and landscaping. The public has become aware that cycads existed on the earth at the same time dinosaurs roamed its surface more than 200 million years ago. Though the term "living fossil" is somewhat a misnomer, since the taxonomic diversity of cycads now is apparently as great as it has ever been if not more so, its application to cycads as a group has no doubt sparked the interest of many who were previously unaware of cycads. Meanwhile, the growing interest in conservation in general, of endangered species in particular, has focused attention on the disappearing animals and plants. The cycads are disappearing.

Alas, the desirability of cycads to adorn gardens, or to form collections, has contributed to their destruction (Plate 26). For example, in Mexico hundreds of thousands of mature plants have been exported to the United States and Japan for the nursery trade, and in South Africa the popularity and cost of the plants has resulted in a thriving black market, causing the destruction of colonies of the more desirable species. Unchecked, this trade has led to extinction in the wild of several of the more popular species.

Loss of natural cycad habitats through urbanization, highway construction, clearing for agriculture, and building of dams has been even more damaging. The greatest threat to cycads, however, has been the clearing of forest habitats by indigenous people who do not know the value of the plants destroyed (Plate 27). This damage is no less destructive because it has been gradual and thus insidious, though its pace in many cycad habitats has unfortunately been on the rise. Its end result is the eradication of habitat along with the organisms living there. If these people were given a choice between cutting down their native cycads or earning money by collecting and selling seeds and thus preserving cycad populations, most would choose the latter. Such a conservation operation could ensure the protection of wild plants while making propagation materials available for research and commerce.

In the evolutionary process, extinction is one of the natural processes, occurring when a plant group is unable to adapt to a changing environment or fails in competitions with plants that are more adaptable. More recently, however, the major cause of extinction is not a natural process. Plants and animals do not drift naturally toward extinction — they are driven to it. In one fashion or another the primary agent of extinction today is man. The human race is exceedingly clever in modifying the environment to fit its own short-term needs, and in doing so destroys hundreds of species in the process. Sadly, this destruction gains momentum with each passing year! On April 2, 1933, David Fairchild, renowned botanist, plant explorer, and conservationist, signed the guest book at Harvard University's botanical garden in Cienfuegos, Cuba, "no function of the science of Botany is more important than that which has to do with the saving from extinction the existing forms of plants which are gradually disappearing from the globe." This remark is just as true now as it was then.