Chicxulub's Nature Preserve (carnivorous plants, orchids, etc)
- Thread starter Chicxulub
- Start date
There are cultivated plants from farms. These guys raise them and sell them. But I guess if someone doesn't want to do the work necessary for that, they take the short cut and poach the wild growing plants. Scumbags. They are a protected species.
Amazing photos, beautiful plants, funny looking at your coldest day of the year when we are having a record breaking heatwave here.
Carnivorous plants are quite different from other plants to culture, so why not take the easy way?
For slow growing plants like cycads people have stolen specimens worth over $20-30k from Kirstenbosch national gardens in Cape town. It's crazy.
It's a general lack of respect for anything and everything.
Yes, unfortunately. In spite of the fact that....
...This^ means that there are tons and tons of legal, ethically sourced ways to legally acquire CPs without poaching from critically endangered habitat. I don't really understand it tbh.
The way to farmed plants got into circulation is mainly due to landowners like myself donating to reputable growers (indeed, I have a seed harvest I'm going to be mailing off quite soon), and through a little bit of poaching back in the 18 and early 1900s when things were, frankly, a hell of a lot better habitat wise than today.
After all, it's not poachers who have driven this entire ecosystem to the brink of extinction, it's the fact that the mesic flatwoods of the Southeastern Coastal Plain are some of the best timber and real estate development land on Earth.
Now though, each site is so precious and rare that it must be vigorously defended. I've spent the last two years doing a comprehensive survey in NE Florida and SE Georgia to attempt to find new sites. 50 years ago, the entire region was basically one big pitcher plant bog.
Two years of searching, and I've found fewer than 30 sites.
CPs have unique soil and water requirements, but if that's met, they literally grow like weeds. They're quite hardy.
I can understand (even if I don't agree with) the taking of cycads. That's just awful! The joy for me is in growing things out.
Wow!!! You've definitely accomplished a pipe dream of mine - to buy, protect and (if need be) restore a large area of ecologically important land. Congratulations! Glad to see things are going well and very excited for future updates on this project.
Jackals keep the rodent population down and prevent meat from rotting, they prevent the spread of disease and blowflies, what more could you want?
Out here they get cactus poachers, it's got to the point where AZ F&G had to drill holes in Saguaros and hide tracking devices in them, it doesn't help that there's still rampant development, even though we don't have water for the people already here
