Plant Comm's (?)

Micro-chipping plants and spraying them with invisible paint are not deterring poachers, who have stayed one step ahead of authorities by x-raying the plants and digging out chips.

But preventing poaching in the first place is still a thorny problem. Stiles suggests that ‘the rarest species [could] be propagated by a non-commercial facility and made available for purchase at reasonable prices.

“Eventually enough of the collectors will have their own that there will be no rare species anywhere, except in the wild. Why buy poached from the wild at high prices when you can buy affordably elsewhere?”

Cycads are not a keystone species and their extinction would not have a major impact on the ecosystem. But they have an intrinsic value, and the loss of this “living dinosaur in the plant world” would be a terrible shame, he adds.

https://twitter.com/i/events/1484549296662155264

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/01/21/a-plant-that-outlived-dinosaurs-is-being-poached-to-extinction-crime-analysts-warn