Although there was no Learning about Biodiversity Factsheet in the March 2015 issue of Veld & Flora, several of the articles are relevant to curriculum topics, as is the article ‘”Are you involved in the illegal cycad trade? Public misconceptions which are detrimental to the survival of South Africa’s cycads” by Kirsten Retief, Adam West and Michèle Pfab. Download the article here.
Cycads are long-lived evergreen woody plants. They have a distinctive appearance, although they resemble palms and ferns. They produce pollen and seeds, but not flowers. They bear cones but are not true conifers. They have existed for millions of years and help us learn what the earliest seed plants may have looked like. They are a group of plants with a unique set of characteristics and are not closely related to any other group of living plants.
A gymnosperm
Cycads are grouped in the gymnosperms: plants with
seeds that are uncovered or naked. Conifers (pines, cedars, cypresses,
yellowwoods, firs, redwoods), Gingko and Welwitschia are also gymnosperms.
Not a kind of
palm
Cycads are often mistake for palms because they
look similar but they are not related. Palms are flowering plants.
Either male or
female
Cycad plants are either male or female, The
botanical term for this is dioecious. You can only tell them apart by their
cones.
Very slow
growing and long-lived
Some cycads take 15 to 20 years before they start
producing whorls (rings) of large leaves and their first cones. Cycads can live for hundreds of years. There is a
cycad in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London that was collected in South
Africa in 1772. Some of the cycads at Kirstenbosch were already old plants when
they were planted in 1914.
Above text courtesy of Alice Notten, Chief
Interpretive Officer, Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden.
There are
303 cycad species in the world, of which 63% are threatened. South Africa has 38
indigenous cycad species (over 10% of the world's cycads). Three of our endemic
species are extinct in the wild, 12 are critically endangered and four are
endangered. More than 50% of our cycads face extinction in the near future. This
makes cycads as threatened as the rhino.
All South
African cycads are on appendix 1 of CITES; therefore trading with any wild
cycad is illegal.
READ MORE Many of our National Botanical Gardens have living cycad collections. Read more about them here.
Newton, C. 2014. Rarer than rhino and just as prized by poachers. University of Cape Town.
Nordling, L. 2014. Forensic chemistry could stop African plant thieves: Isotope analysis could help in the rush to save South Africa's cycads from extinction. Nature 514(17).
Retief, K., West, A.G. and Pfab, M. 2014. Can stable isotopes and radiocarbon dating provide a forensic solution for curbing illegal harvesting of threatened cycads? Journal of Forensic Sciences 59(6), 1541-1551.
