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January 27, 2025

Succulent Poaching: How The Rise In Illegal Trade Is Pushing ‘Green Diamonds’ To Extinction

Plant poaching is a huge 'unseen' market, with an estimated black market value of £8.2 billion.
Martin Heigan mh@icon.co.za

[Image: Martin Heigan/ Flickr]

South Africa has seen a significant increase in the poaching of over 1.5 million succulents, which are home to one-third of all known species.

Over 45% of these species are now on the brink of extinction, as is the case for the Conophytum, or conos.

Conos are succulents that are among the most unique plants on the earth. Most take up to a half-decade to mature, and range in size from pinhead to coin. Their small, water-swollen limbs take on hallucinatory shapes reminiscent of Miyazaki’s films (Howl’s Moving Castle), or as a Reddit user once described them: “a bouquet of moving eyeballs”.

Conophytum burgeri is one of the species known as “living pebbles”. Following winter rains, they lose their fragile papery skin, becoming transparent and jellylike. Others are known as dumplings, button plants, or waterblasies (water blisters). Conophytum maughanii produces a solitary, wild-looking bloom between small pouting lips.

Conophytum obscurum [Image: Plant Identifier] 
Conos grow exclusively in the plains of South Africa’s Cape provinces and the Kalahari Desert in adjacent Namibia. That severe environment has honed their adaptability to incredible levels. Many species are endemic, meaning they may only be found on one farm, slope, or cliff face.

The environmental destruction is not limited to the conos, as the interdependency between species makes these dry, arid regions fragile.

The trade of conos has been a significant issue since 2010 when potted conos began appearing for sale on eBay. The demand for these plants has led to an increase in prices, often thousands of pounds, for a single plant. This has led to the confiscation of hundreds and thousands of plants, which were previously illegally harvested since the 1970s.

Plant poaching is a huge ‘unseen’ market, with an estimated black market value of £8.2 billion.

In 2015, a Spanish couple posing as tourists were arrested with 14 cardboard boxes stuffed with endangered conos. In 2019, a Chinese buyer named “Doctor Flower” was fined R150,000 for illegally harvesting conos. The next year, two South Korean citizens were found with more than 60,000 conos, and one was wanted in the US for harvesting half a million dollars worth of Dudleya Farinosa, another kind of succulent, in California.

South Africa’s botanists are now struggling to process and find homes for 3,000 confiscated succulent plants, which need to be repotted each week.

Some conos are so hyperendemic that poachers can wipe out the entire population of one species in just a couple of visits. The growing hauls are challenging due to the wild country nature of the succulent karoo, which is often washed away or impassable.

Financial Times reports that the 2019 pandemic has also turbocharged the trade, with millions of people worldwide taking an interest in online shopping and collecting houseplants.

A quick Google shows that it’s not that hard to buy one of these endangered plants, as shown by the below advert on eBay. One has to wonder how ‘plant shop from Ukraine’ got hold of these conos?

[Image: eBay]
Conservationists confiscated over 300,000 succulents by the end of 2021, but this is only one-quarter of the total harvested by traffickers.

Some researchers believe the succulents trade is bigger than that for rhino horns, controlled at the top by syndicate bosses whose reach extends as far as East Asia.

The problem has become so big that scientists have now stopped the age-old tradition of naming plants after the region they were found in – to avoid tipping off poachers as to where they can be harvested,

A lecturer at John Moores recently said the internet has exacerbated a tendency he’s seen in past plant poaching crises.

“It grew from a highly specialised to a much more general commerce, resulting in a larger consumer base.”

Policing the trade online is as impossible as policing the desert. There are no general international norms, and even well-meaning customers aren’t usually aware they’re purchasing illegally collected plants.

“It’s a free for all now.”

[Source: Financial Times]