“Surely this is the most solitary organism in the world,” wrote palaeontologist Richard Fortey in his ebook concerning the evolution of life.
He was speaking about Encephalartos woodii (E. woodii), a plant from South Africa. E. woodii is a member of the cycad household, heavy crops with thick trunks and enormous stiff leaves that type an impressive crown.
These resilient survivors have outlasted dinosaurs and a number of mass extinctions. As soon as widespread, they’re at the moment some of the threatened species on the planet.
The one identified wild E. Woodii was found in 1895 by the botanist John Medley Wooden whereas he was on a botanical expedition within the Ngoye Forest in South Africa.
He searched the neighborhood for others, however none might be discovered. Over the following couple of a long time, botanists eliminated stems and offshoots and cultivated them in gardens.
Fearing that the ultimate stem can be destroyed, the Forestry Division eliminated it from the wild in 1916 for safekeeping in a protecting enclosure in Pretoria, South Africa, making it extinct within the wild.
The plant has since been propagated worldwide. Nonetheless, the E. woodii faces an existential disaster. All of the crops are clones from the Ngoye specimen. They’re all males, and and not using a feminine, pure replica is unattainable. E. woodii’s story is one in every of each survival and solitude.
My group’s analysis was impressed by the dilemma of the lonely plant and the chance {that a} feminine should still be on the market. Our analysis entails utilizing distant sensing applied sciences and synthetic intelligence to help in our seek for a feminine within the Ngoye Forest.
The evolutionary journey of cycads
Cycads are the oldest surviving plant teams alive at the moment and are also known as “living fossils” or ” dinosaur crops” resulting from their evolutionary historical past courting again to the Carboniferous interval, roughly 300 million years in the past.
Throughout the Mesozoic period (250-66 million years in the past), often known as the Age of Cycads, these crops have been ubiquitous, thriving within the heat, humid climates that characterised the interval.
Though they resemble ferns or palms, cycads will not be associated to both. Cycads are gymnosperms, a gaggle that features conifers and ginkgos.
Not like flowering crops (angiosperms), cycads reproduce utilizing cones. It’s unattainable to inform female and male aside till they mature and produce their magnificent cones.
Feminine cones are usually huge and spherical, and male cones seem elongated and narrower. The male cones produce pollen, which is carried by bugs (weevils) to the feminine cones. This historical methodology of replica has remained largely unchanged for tens of millions of years.
Regardless of their longevity, at the moment cycads are ranked as probably the most endangered residing organisms on Earth with nearly all of the species thought of threatened with extinction.
That is due to their gradual development and reproductive cycles, usually taking ten to twenty years to mature, and habitat loss resulting from deforestation, grazing and over-collection. Cycads have grow to be symbols of botanical rarity.
Their hanging look and historical lineage make them well-liked in unique decorative horticulture and that has led to unlawful commerce.
Uncommon cycads can command exorbitant costs from US$620 (£495) per cm with some specimens promoting for tens of millions of kilos every. The poaching of cycads is a risk to their survival.
Among the many most beneficial species is the E. woodii. It’s protected in botanical gardens with safety measures corresponding to alarmed cages designed to deter poachers.
AI within the sky
In our search to discover a feminine E.woodii we’ve used progressive applied sciences to discover areas of the forest from a vertical vantage level.
In 2022 and 2024, our drone surveys coated an space of 195 acres or 148 soccer fields, creating detailed maps from 1000’s of images taken by the drones. It is nonetheless a small portion of the Ngoye Forest, which covers 10,000 acres.
Our AI system enhanced the effectivity and accuracy of those searches. As E. woodii is taken into account extinct within the wild, artificial photographs have been used within the AI mannequin’s coaching to enhance its capability, by way of a picture recognition algorithm, to recognise cycads by form in numerous ecological contexts.
Plant species globally are disappearing at an alarming fee. Since all present E. woodii specimens are clones, their potential for genetic variety within the face of environmental change and illness is proscribed.
Notable examples embrace the Nice Famine in 1840s Eire, the place the uniformity of cloned potatoes worsened the disaster, and the vulnerability of clonal Cavendish bananas to Panama illness, which threatens their manufacturing because it did with the Gros Michel banana within the Fifties.
Discovering a feminine would imply E. woodii is not on the brink of extinction and will revive the species. A feminine would permit for sexual replica, usher in genetic variety, and signify a breakthrough in conservation efforts.
E. woodii is a sobering reminder of the fragility of life on Earth. However our quest to find a feminine E. woodii exhibits there may be hope even for probably the most endangered species if we act quick sufficient.
Laura Cinti, Analysis Fellow in bio artwork & plant behaviour, College of Southampton
This text is republished from The Dialog underneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the unique article.
