“It is certainly the loneliest organism in the world,” paleontologist Richard Forty wrote in his book on the evolution of life.
He was talking about Encephalartos woodii (E. woodii), a plant from South Africa. E. woodii is a member of the cycad family, heavy plants with thick trunks and large stiff leaves that form a majestic crown. These hardy survivors have outlived the dinosaurs and numerous mass extinctions. Once widespread, today they are one of the most endangered species on the planet.
The only known wild E. Woody was discovered in 1895 by botanist John Medley Wood while on a botanical expedition to the Ngoye Forest in South Africa. He searched the area for others but could find none. Over the next few decades, botanists removed the stems and shoots and cultivated them in gardens.
Fearing that the last stem would be destroyed, the Department of Forestry removed it from the wild in 1916 for storage in a protective enclosure in Pretoria, South Africa, making it extinct in the wild. Since then, the plant has spread all over the world. whatever E. woodii facing an existential crisis. All plants are clones from the Ngoye specimen. They are all male and without a female natural reproduction is impossible. E. woodii’s the story is both about survival and loneliness.
My team’s research was inspired by the dilemma of the solitary plant and the possibility that a female might still be out there. Our research involves the use of remote sensing and artificial intelligence technologies to assist us in our search for a female in Ngoye Forest.
The evolutionary journey of cicadas
Cycads are the oldest surviving living plant groups today and are often referred to as “living fossils” or “dinosaur plants” due to their evolutionary history dating back to the Carboniferous period, approximately 300 million years ago. During the Mesozoic Era (250-66 million years ago), also known as the Age of Cycads, these plants were ubiquitous, thriving in the warm and humid climate that characterized the period.
Although they resemble ferns or palms, cycads are not related to either. Cycads are gymnosperms, a group that includes conifers and ginkgos. Unlike flowering plants (angiosperms), cycads reproduce using cones. It is impossible to tell the males and females apart until they mature and produce their magnificent cones.
Female cones are usually wide and round, while male cones appear elongated and narrower. The male cones produce pollen that is carried by insects (breasts) to the female cones. This ancient method of reproduction has remained largely unchanged for millions of years.
Despite their longevity, cicadas are today ranked as the most endangered living organisms on Earth, with the majority of species considered threatened with extinction. This is due to their slow growth and breeding cycles, which typically take ten to 20 years to mature, and habitat loss due to deforestation, grazing and overharvesting. Cicadas have become a symbol of botanical rarity.
Their striking appearance and ancient ancestry make them popular with exotic ornamental gardeners and this has led to an illegal trade. Rare cycad species can command exorbitant prices of $620 (£495) per cm, with some specimens selling for millions of pounds each. Poaching of cycads is a threat to their survival.
It is among the most valuable species E. woodii. It is protected in botanical gardens with security measures such as alarm cages designed to deter poachers.
AI in the sky
In our quest to find a wife E. woodii we used innovative technologies to explore forest areas from a vertical perspective. In 2022 and 2024, our drone surveys covered an area of 195 acres, or 148 football fields, creating detailed maps from thousands of photos taken by the drones. This is still a small part of the Ngoye Forest, which covers 10,000 acres.
Our AI system has improved the efficiency and accuracy of these searches. Like E. woodii considered extinct in the wild, synthetic images were used in training the AI model to improve its ability, through an image recognition algorithm, to recognize cicadas by shape in different ecological contexts.
Plant species worldwide are disappearing at an alarming rate. Since all existing E. woodii specimens are clones, their potential for genetic diversity in the face of environmental change and disease is limited.
Notable examples include the Great Famine of the 1840s in Ireland, where the uniformity of cloned potatoes exacerbated the crisis, and the vulnerability of cloned Cavendish bananas to Panama disease, which threatened their production, as happened with the Gros Michel banana in the 1950s century.
Finding a wife would mean E. woodii is no longer on the brink of extinction and can revive the species. The female would enable sexual reproduction, bring genetic diversity and represent a breakthrough in conservation efforts.
E. woodii is a sobering reminder of the fragility of life on Earth. But our quest to find a female E. woodii shows that there is hope for even the most endangered species if we act fast enough.
Laura Sinti, Research Associate in Bioart and Plant Behavior, University of Southampton. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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