Science Friday - Botanical Rescue Centers Take In Illegally Trafficked Plants

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

There’s a thriving black market to buy and sell endangered plants, and the Department of Agriculture and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitor endangered species that are brought into the United States illegally. When they are discovered, the plants’ home country has 30 days to accept them. If they aren’t claimed, they get rescued. Then where do they go? To one of 62 plant rescue centers across the country at botanic gardens, zoos, and arboretums, operating according to an agreement through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES).Ira talks with Dr. Susan Pell, executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden, and Amy Highland, plant curator at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, DC, about the garden’s plant rescue program.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

When the authorities nab plant poachers transporting endangered species, what happens to the plants? So oftentimes we'll receive some plant material and we'll spend a significant amount of time nursing it back to health. It's Monday, March 25th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Shoshana Buxbaum. The USDA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitor if endangered plant species are illegally being brought into the country. And when they're discovered, if their home country doesn't accept them within 30 days, they get rescued. Then where do they go? Iroflato talks with two botanists from the U.S. Botanic Garden about their plant rescue program.

Dr. Susan Pell, executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., and Amy Hyland plant curator at the Botanic Garden. Welcome to Science Friday. Well, thanks so much for having us. We're really excited to have this conversation with you today. Nice to have you. Tell us what happens when an endangered plant is confiscated? How does it end up at the U.S. Botanic Garden? Well, we usually start off with a phone call when these plants are brought into the country, usually through an airport or other port of entry. They are confiscated by the USDA. And someone will call us up and say that they have these plants available.

And would we be able to either host them while they are awaiting to be sent back to their home country or to keep them in perpetuity if they cannot be returned to. to their host country. So oftentimes we'll receive some plant material and we'll spend a significant amount of time nursing it back to health and spending some time trying to give it a proper identification, making sure that it's healthy enough to then be used in other ways of the botanic garden for education or for further conservation purposes. So you'll keep them there virtually forever if no one claims them? Yes, we will. Wow. They will live out their typical life cycle. We will often propagate them, make more copies of a plant when it's possible. And those copies will either be shared, transferred to other rescue locations so that we have backups for our backups.

Or, like I said, put on display so that we can share them with the public and help educate the public about these rare and often very beautiful plants. Speaking of beautiful plants, tell me what the most common type of plants you rescue. you? We usually accept mostly orchids and cactus and succulents for these plants. We have houses under glass where we can grow these things year round. We have received some native orchid species in the past, though a vast majority of the things that we are receiving are orchids and cactus. And Dr. Pell, why are orchids and succulents and cacti so desirable to traffic? I mean, there are plenty of legal ways to grow them, right? There are absolutely legal ways to them. And it's a good question. Why do people seek wild collected plans? I think part of it is the

constant sort of quest to increase diversity of people's individual collections. I think the novelty of having something that's different from what they can buy at their local grocery store, nursery, is also compelling for people. And frankly, it's a way for people to make money as well. So pulling things from the wild is sort of a free act. There's a lot of risk to it, of course, especially if they're doing so illegally, but it is a way for people to make money. And so there's compelling reasons to do it on the front side. But of course, these activities are really detrimental to wild populations, driving many plants close to extinction and some to extinction,

just because people want to put them in their collections and grow them at home. How many plants has the Botanic Garden received through the rescue program? We've received hundreds over the years. We currently have 375 living in our collections, at least two dozen of them are on display for the public to see at this time. Is there a season to them? I mean, maybe around the holidays, people shipping plants, or is there not a season? These plants really come to us year-round because primarily we're getting plants that are taken

out of either tropical areas or desert areas. And the seasonality is whenever the people can get there to collect them. And that's really year-round. So as of coming into ports of entry, they might be coming into, you know, Mediterranean ports on the western coast of the United States or subtropical ports and, you know, southern parts of the United States, or they might be coming here in the mid-Atlantic. So they're coming from all over the world, from all different areas to all different ports here in the U.S. And their rescue centers really across the country. We're one of many, many public gardens that serve as plant rescue centers. And typically, we're going to be receiving materials that are brought into ports near us, but not always.

Sometimes we get things all the way from California. Wow. So tell me what's the wildest story, Dr. Powell, of a plant that the garden rescued? You know, there are a lot of really good stories. I would say, you know, most of the stories that I'm familiar with are really have to do with orchids that come in often in large shipments. And so one orchid in particular, a lady slipper orchid, Phaepidlum, glauacophyllum, came to our collection in 1999.

It was via U.S. Fish and Wildlife that confiscated at the border. It was part of a large shipment of ladieslipper orchids that were seized, at LAX, at LA International Airport. And they were apparently wild collected in Indonesia, and they were shipped to California for the receipt of a nursery there. They were deliberately mislabeled as hybrids in an effort to evade detection. And they were known to not be those hybrids by the inspecting service. And we're seized.

It actually took us several years in our collection to get these plants to bloom. And eventually, after several years, when they did bloom, botanist, Kyle Wallach was able to identify them and definitively show proof that they were, in fact, this wild collected lady slipper that was not the hybrid that they had been labeled at. So you had to wait till it bloomed to know what it was? We did. And that's often the case. So most of these plants are coming to us in very poor states. They've been shipped from around the world and they're coming to us needing water, needing nutrients, needing sunlight, and we really have to nurse them back to health. And so even with our, you know,

expert care and our wonderful facilities, we sometimes have to spend several years to get them back to, you know, a healthy state where they can bloom. And it's often that bloom that's required for us to be able to identify them definitively. And especially when you're speaking about orchids, there are tens of thousands, right, of species of orchids more than any other plan. That's right. It's one of the two most diverse families on Earth. And there's about 30,000 species of orchids in the wild. And there are over 100,000 cultivars of orchids. So that's why it's so hard for you to figure out what you had in hand there.

That's exactly right. And I think, you know, orchids are just such a beloved plant. People just love them all around the world. And it's that love that has really allowed people or encouraged people to, to create the over 100,000 cultivars from the original 30,000 wild species of orchids. Wow. Amy, how do you decide where a plant goes once you get it in? Well, we're looking at the growing conditions that these orchids require.

Usually before they bloom, we can tell if it's a tropical orchid or a hardy orchid, and we can decide which house it belongs in. We can also play with the watering regime and the nutrients to determine which is going to work best overall for that particular species. Once it is brought back to health, and once we know what. it is. That's when we'll determine where and if we're going to display it. Some things are too rare even to display. Really? And they will stay at our production facility. There are just some things that are too tempting for folks. And so those perhaps will not go on display. Do you ever lend them out to orchid growers, just as foster plants that take care of? No, we do not. So under our agreement

with CITES, we hold them. We can transfer them to other CITES rescue areas, but we cannot give them to growers or breeders in this country. If we were to propagate any kind of our CITES plant material, we would do it with the purpose of making it less tempting in the wild. And it certainly wouldn't be clones to put back into the wild, but just to make the need for them to be taken from the wild less necessary. Have you ever had someone try to take a rear orchid at the garden, either a clipping or just steal it because it was so rare? We actually occasionally have plant theft. And really, it's interesting to look at the few times that it has happened over the last, say, 10 years. Sometimes you can tell that it's somebody who really, really knows plants because they've selected

something that's either rare in the wild or maybe that's just rare in cultivation. And sometimes it's just somebody who thought it was pretty. So it doesn't seem to be a trend of people coming to the garden to find particular plants, anything like that. But we have occasional theft, as do many public gardens. And do you have an orchid show or people can come and look at them? We do have an orchid show. We actually have an orchid show every year.

We host it in alternating years with Smithsonian Gardens. So that's a collaboration that we have with Smithsonian Gardens. They are hosting it this year. And it's actually up right now through the end of April. You know, we've been talking about. talking a lot about plants that are coming from other countries, but this also happens a lot in the U.S., right, Amy? Give me an example of that. It does happen in the United States. We have some pretty rare flora here in the continental U.S. as well. One of our most common examples of poaching from the

wild would be our carnivorous plants. We have venous flytraps in the southeastern United States, And those are sort of a favorite target for people looking to take plants directly out of the wild. We have a fairly good understanding now of every population of Venus flytrap in North America. And we've taken measures to reduce the amount of poaching that happens. Trail cameras, genetically reviewing our plant material so that we can tell where an individual plant came from if it is confiscated. things like that to try and reduce these poaching pressures on our wild populations of the plants that are rare and only found here in North America like our Venus flytrap. That is a cool plant, and I can see why people would like to own one. What about pitcher plants?

Another carnivorous eater. Anything like that going on? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, all the carnivorous plants that are native to the U.S. are under threat for poaching. Absolutely. People love carnivorous plants. They have such a unique story and they are modified in a way that allows them to have these human-like characteristics, the eating of other organisms. And it just is so captivating for people anywhere that they find these in nature.

So yes, they are a target for poachers. Now, if I go visit the U.S. Botanic Garden, Dr. Pell or Amy, will I see a little bit of a little bit of, note or a little mark on a plant that say, hey, this is a rescued plant? You will. So our plant label that's visible on all of our plants that are on display to the public, there will be a little note in the top corner that says cites. And that's an indication that that plant came to us through the plant rescue center program. You know, I have a lot of orchids. I've been raising orchids for quite some time. They're overrunning my house. And, you know, learning about all these trafficked orchids kind of makes me sad. So I'm wondering, how can I make sure

I'm not actually or accidentally purchasing an illegal orchid, Dr. Pell? I think the best thing you can do is just make sure that you're buying it from a reputable source. There are, you know, there's been an explosion since the pandemic of interest in house plants, orchids included, succulent plants included, which is really one of the major kind of threats to them in the wild. people really want to have these plants in their house. And so what I've seen is a huge increase in people selling plants online. So individuals selling, you know, things from their collection or things maybe that they've collected in the wild online.

And I would avoid those kind of sellers. So really make sure that you're buying from a reputable source and established nursery that you know their practices and can trust that they are not legally collecting plants and then selling them. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking with Dr. Susan Pell and Amy Highland from the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., about the gardens program to rescue illegally traded endangered species. And so why is it, if there's so many of them, why is it so important to save these plants? Wow, it's such a good question.

I mean, I think ensuring the survival of the biodiversity of Earth is not only something that we should want to do, but really something that I think, we as people are really required to do in a lot of ways. And that's for selfish reasons in part. We love to look at beautiful things. We get a lot of our medicine, something like 70% of our medicine comes from plants and fungi, but also because the niche that that organism has in its native community is something that's really valuable and can hold that community together. You never know when the removal of a single species from a habitat might have a cascading impact, cascading negative impact on that habitat, not just on that individual and maybe the things that are dependent directly on it, but also the organisms that are dependent on it. And sometimes that can

actually have an impact on the entire structure of the ecosystem as well. So you never know when that one species is going to be really a crucial species for the stability of that ecosystem, the survival of other organisms that are dependent on it, or when maybe that organism might have a direct benefit to people as well. That's such a great point, Susan. And perhaps it goes without saying, but one of the things that we do not recommend is collecting any plants in the wild. We have seen a resurgence in interest in people helping with conservation activities, and we need these people to be engaged with us in the conservation of plant life. But we always recommend that you do it with others. It's never a solo mission. So join up. Join other conservation organizations. If you're looking for,

for plants in the wild, join other organizations if you're planning on doing something as simple as removing invasives or things that are harmful to the environment. You know, I know this is like asking if you have a favorite child, Amy, but do you have a favorite plant at the garden? We won't tell anybody. That is really hard. I have been really enjoying this spring, and our prunists have just come into full bloom here. And it has been a fabulous thing to watch. Our magnolia displays around the city have started to pop. And that's really captivated me at the moment as well. I'm also a trillium girl. A lot of my research is in trillions, which are these lovely spring ephemerales that are perhaps more common

than orchids are, but you can see the decline in them. Whereas a generation ago, botanists could walk and see fields of orchids, you really can't see that today. You can still see the fields of trillium. And I think that perhaps it will be the thing to captivate our next generation of botanists and plant explorers, the way that the orchid once did in North America. Susan, do you have a favorite plant? Wow, that is always such a hard question for me. I would say that every day I have a different favorite plant.

It just depends on what's doing. its thing today. So today, right now, in the Garden Court, which is the first room that you come into in the conservatory, we have a lovely display of a Morphalus conjac, which is a very stinky, but much smaller cousin of the corpse flower. And that's just a delight to be able to share just a little bit of our Morphalus collection with the public, especially when it's in peak stinky bloom. Wow, that's great. The U.S. Botanic Garden, one of my favorite places in D.C. I want to thank both of you for taking time to deal with this. Dr. Susan Pell, executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden, Washington, and Amy Highland, plant curator at the garden. Thank you both for this

great conversation. Thank you, Ira. Thanks so much. That's all the time we have for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Annie Nero, Emma Gomez, Charles Bergquist, Danielle Johnson. tomorrow the physics of sea lion swimming how our blubbery friends might help us create better underwater vehicles i'm sci-fri producer shoshana bucksbaum catch you next time