Pre-dating the Triassic period 248 million years ago, through the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago to the present, there is only one living organism which has survived. Almost every picture of these periods has cycads as a backdrop. They are silent witnesses to the arrival of insects, mega-reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals. Cycads have been around for 400-million years and are amongst the oldest organisms on earth. They have survived two mass extinctions that nearly blotted out all life on earth. Cycads have successfully survived almost everything nature could throw at them over millions of years, but, as with many other threatened species, cycads have not been able to survive the greed of mankind.
With their distinctive shape and poise, cycads exude a commanding presence. They are the oldest living seed plants on earth – their evolution can be traced back to the Palaeozoic era, maybe 400-million years ago. They pre-date angio-sperms (modern trees) by more than 100-million years and reached their greatest abundance during the Jurassic period. Over that vast timespan, they developed the sort of defences that have made them survivors into the modern age. Along the way they made a few friends and came to an accommodation with some enemies. Apart from their scaly trunks and spiky topknots as defence, cycads cooked up some venal poisons to ensure they’re left alone. These substances – found only in cycads – go under the tongue-tangling name methylazoxymethanol glycosides (MAM-glycosides for short). This combination of compounds kills nerves (it’s a neurotoxin), causes gene mutations and damages the DNA in insect and mammal cells (it breaks the DNA strands). It can even alter your chromosomes. Basically, eat it and it can trash your brain, collapse your liver and you can end up with liver or stomach cancer in a matter of weeks. This is a tree with a kick.
Leopard Magpie Moth
Even plants with nuclear defences, however, need to be pollinated and have their seeds dispersed. And – with a few million years in which to experiment – it would be surprising
if there weren’t a few beasties which developed a taste for poison. One of these is the delightfully named and highly coloured leopard magpie moth. It lays its eggs on cycad leaves and the caterpillars, when they hatch, chew away on the
deadly leaves, all the while sequestering the poisons in their body. After a few moults, the caterpillars burrow into the ground,
weave a cocoon, and finally emerge as a moth so deadly from
its poison store that if you eat it you’re history. Birds learn the hard way, but they do learn and the moths are generally left in peace. How the poisons don’t kill the insect is still a mystery for science to solve.
Weevil
For wacky design, however, the prize goes to snouted weevils, some of which look like an oddly armoured knight with his jousting lance welded to his helmet, but have more incommon with a Black and Decker hand drill. Among the weevils are those with extraordinary snouts that are used to drill into the seed core of the cones into which they then lay their eggs. Others have shorter snouts because, being smaller and flatter, they can creep into the cone when it opens slightly during pollination and therefore have less distance to drill. Both types pollinate the plant. When the young hatch, they eat their way out of their poisoned chalice and, ever after, are themselves inedible. But here’s the genius of the thing. There comes a time when seeds need to be distributed. But who’d do the job if they’d get poisoned in the process? So, at a certain time of the year, the cycad emits intriguing aromas, neutralizes poison in its cones and offers tasty seeds to birds for distribution. You’d think that, considering how poisonous cycads are, humans would leave them well alone. But they don’t.
In South Africa they’re being plundered to extinction and last year the International Union for Conservation of Nature or IUCN declared them the most threatened organism on the planet. Being endangered is a self-fulfilling prophesy – it ups your value and the subsequent plunder increases your rarity. In the 1980′s a survey of a particular species recorded 700 in Limpopo; a recent survey found only 100. At least two species in the province have disappeared altogether. In the Eastern Cape poachers have reduced the numbers of wild cycad by half, and at last count there were only 50 left. In an effort to trace stolen plants, electronic identification chips were inserted into them. But it hasn’t worked. So much money is being made that poachers have worked out a way to replace the chips with their own, making it difficult to prove they were stolen. In the United States, collectors have been known to pay up to $20 000 for an Albany cycad. With that kind of money being offered, thieves can afford to be high tech – and daring. When the last wild cycad is dug up and tossed into the back of a poacher’s bakkie, we will have killed off a creature that has survived for hundreds of millions of years and two mass extinctions. It will be a terrible indictment of our species.
For hungry birds which rely on cycads for food, snouted weevils and the leopard magpie moth, it will be a disaster.
For more information, see the comprehensive book Cycad World of Innovation by Adolf Fanfoni. To order it, email info@cycadwofi.com or check out www.cycadwofi.com.
More reading Canarius Blog; Garden Wise; The Scenic South
