
Busting Cactus Smugglers in the American West - Thevet
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/cactus-thieves/470070/?single_page=true
======
Shivetya
Simply amazing, part of the reason I keep reading here is that things I would
never suspect just appear.

So knowing that people do come here and go elsewhere for cacti we can assume
other types of plants are susceptible as well. Also based on this knowledge,
is there any danger to purposefully spreading certain lines to other parts of
the world? Surely there are similar environments which might become home to a
transplanted variety, the danger is that its no invasive or dangerous to other
specie.

~~~
Symbiote
> So knowing that people do come here and go elsewhere for cacti we can assume
> other types of plants are susceptible as well

Yes, absolutely. Animals make the news more (rhinos, lions etc), but the plant
groups of cacti, orchids and bromeliads are very desirable to certain
collectors.

A $500 fine — and presumably a ban on returning to the USA — doesn't seem like
much deterrent. That's not covered a fraction of the cost of the
investigation, and is very small compared to the black-market value of the
plants.

~~~
matt_morgan
Agreed on the fine. I wish the article had said something about what happens
beyond the fine ... will these people be barred from entering the country? Is
there a list that will help people keep them out of other countries?

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chiph
> dug up eight saguaros from federal land in daylight, then sold them for
> $2,000 apiece, two of them he shipped to Austria.

Saguaros are amazingly heavy (people have been killed by the "arms" landing on
them) - I'm sort of impressed that the buyers could afford to ship something
that large and awkward.

~~~
Grishnakh
As for those arms, here's another fun fact:

Saguaros with arms are much more desirable and valuable than ones without
them. So if you have a saguaro in your yard and it has no arms (or not
enough), it's pretty easy to make it grow one: just get an axe and whack it
really hard! It'll grow an arm where you chopped it with the axe. (However,
it'll take a while to grow: these cacti are _very_ slow growing.)

Full-grown saguaros are thousands of pounds heavy, and can exceed 10,000
pounds for really old and large ones.

For the ones shipped, I imagine they got smaller, younger ones. I'm not sure
how you'd ship a mature one intercontinentally without it dying.

And honestly, digging them up from Federal land isn't that bad; there was an
incident a few years ago in Arizona where the government happily destroyed
_thousands_ of such cacti, simply because they were in the way of some power
line. You'd think they could have sold them, and let the cactus sellers come
take them and transplant them: there's a huge demand for them in the developed
areas, but they're very expensive due to the limited supply since wild ones
(on Federal and state land) are off-limits. But nope, they just got some
machine in there and ground them all up. A lot of people were pissed about
that.

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zeveb
Seems awfully silly to ban cactus propagation in order to preserve cacti from
extinction. Cows and wheat are in no danger of extinction; a healthy trade in
cacti would enhance the survivability of each species.

~~~
Symbiote
There may only be a few known plants, and it's likely there's already some in
a botanic garden — professionally cared for and available for research, rather
than stuffed in a suitcase then hidden in a shed. Several of the cacti
mentioned are available commercially, but that's not good enough for these
collectors.

(Incidentally, collectors also steal plants from botanic gardens.)

> Cows and wheat are in no danger of extinction

Not necessarily. There's very little genetic diversity in domesticated
species, which leaves them susceptible to disease and intolerant of changes to
climate etc. The "crop wild relatives" are essential if some disease does
appear — as it did for bananas — and threaten to wipe out the domesticated
breed/variety.

~~~
hydrogen18
When you say "limited genetic diversity" in reference to a mammal like a cow I
am inclined to agree. They reproduce sexually and can gain or lose traits.

But I am unsure if you can have a 'wild relative' of a banana as my
understanding is every single instance of the plant is just a clone. I might
have it wrong however, the plant might be able to undergo sexual reproduction
but is propagated by humans cloning it.

For example, consider Pando. Apparently the plant could theoretically
reproduce sexually but hasn't in thousands of years. No one is even sure if it
could be induced.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_\(tree\))

~~~
Symbiote
There's crazy genetics happening here, which I certainly don't understand
enough to explain — I'm not a botanist, I just write software for them.

But wild bananas do have seeds. There's a picture of the seeds of _Musa
balbisiana_ [1], one of the ancestors of cultivated bananas.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_balbisiana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_balbisiana)

~~~
hydrogen18
I agree completely that the wild bananas have seeds. But do domesticated ones
even have the structures to pollinate?

In any case, with modern tech. we could probably redomesticate bananas in a
few years. I'm less bothered by the food implications of bananas dying off
than the economic ones. Bananas are big business for some equatorial
countries. An upset in the economy usually precedes an upset in the
government.

~~~
nkurz
_But do domesticated ones even have the structures to pollinate?_

Yes, the seeds in Cavendish bananas are rare but viable.

There was a Canadian documentary a few years ago that featured a Honduran
banana breeder: [http://modernfarmer.com/2015/05/review-the-fruit-
hunters/](http://modernfarmer.com/2015/05/review-the-fruit-hunters/)

And here's a recent PBS segment that covers just banana breeding:
[http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/inside-the-fight-to-save-
the-...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/inside-the-fight-to-save-the-bananas-
we-know-and-love/)

~~~
hydrogen18
That is interesting. If I find a Cavendish with seeds and I plant them, do the
fruits of that plant also have seeds?

