Plant Poaching and Our Part In It – Takeaways from Kal Kaminer’s SDCSS Talk

Fair warning for anyone who’s a regular reader: This isn’t an image-heavy post, and is a long read.

I’m finally home from our monthly cactus club meeting, and I’m fired up – this month’s talk was a fantastic lecture from Kal Kaminer, proprietor of LA Succulents, a nursery based up in Los Angeles. Titled “Grab A Shovel: An Honest Talk About Conservation in the Cactus & Succulent Community”, it promised to be particularly interesting given Kal’s history.

If you’re unaware of who Kal is or why his history matters here, that’s fair. It was a Whole Thing when it went down, but if you’re not big in mesembs or active in online communities in the US, you may not have heard a thing about it. Back in 2019, Kal was arrested for poaching in South Africa (in his talk, he describes that he was there hunting down stapeliads not available in cultivation), and it was an entire year before he was sentenced. He was heavily vilified online, with people celebrating his arrest and sentencing, and lots of piling on to what a terrible human being he must be to have been doing such a thing.

On the surface, knowing absolutely nothing else, yes, what he did was awful. And he should atone – which he is doing!

But that part of his talk was the least interesting part. What he did is old news, at this point, and the actions he’s taken speak even louder than his words after the incident.

What was far more interesting was his approach to the issue of poaching in our clubs and the history of wild collection that is pretty necessary for any of us to have the plants we love today. Sure, there’s hundreds of species grown from seed and easily propagated in cultivation now…but where did the parent plants come from? The first mother plant? The first seeds?

Wild collected.

Kal threw up a historical flier from an old Cactus and Succulent Society of America (CSSA) convention, where the activities included a field trip and picnic out to a spot in Arizona where attendees could field collect their own specimens, after which they’d head back to the hotel to clean and prepare those specimens to ship home. My beloved Lithops and their labeling system come from a very dedicated UK couple (Professor Cole and his wife, Naureen Cole) in the early 1900s going to Africa and field collecting plants by the dozens. They’d take entire seed pods and/or plants, and ship them home to grow there.

This isn’t unique to plants, either. Not a part of Kal’s talk, but from my own experience, reptiles and amphibians have the same sort of history. I highly recommend The Lizard King if you’d like to read more about it, but I always remember the book’s line “the saying went that whenever a new species was discovered, two Germans got on a plane.” The joke was that, for whatever reason, in Germany in particular they were very fond of going to out to capture or collect animals. As soon as something new appeared on the scene, a couple Germans were sure to be on the way to get some. No dig on Germans as a whole, of course, but I believe the laws there are lax enough to be a major reason it seems to be a German much of the time.

What does this history have to do with us today?

Sure, sure, historically, we collected plants.

But what Kal really drove home is that this isn’t old news. This isn’t “just in the past”.

And he was uniquely positioned to be able to point out just how accessible poached plants really are today.

He told us about poaching operations in Tanzania, and described how it was possible for enterprising individuals in various countries (including Thailand) to follow the rules well enough to get phytosanitary certificates and all the necessary paperwork to make their poached plants perfectly legal.

Once the plants have their legal paperwork in the country of origin, they’re able to easily get shipped out all over the world, including here to the US. People asked how he was finding the screen captures and images he was using to show us what the poaching operations look like – the folks doing this are proud of it! They post it online! I get people soliciting me to buy some of these every few months; I can vouch for how active these people are and how much they are reaching out online to get a market.

Plants that develop large caudexes are particularly at risk, and are most often poached. The plant below is one example. 

The plant above is most certainly originally a field collected plant. Growing these from seed in cultivation, they hang on to their spines for a long time, and are almost unrecognizable when compared to their wild cousins. Despite this listing saying they’ve “had it for a long time”, I’d have serious questions, and would want to see some provenance about its history before forking up the money.

You probably recognize the layout above – yes, that plant is available on Etsy. A surprising number of poached plants are readily available for sale on our common sales platforms. 

Another poached plant, this one a Phyllanthus. Again, you can tell that it’s poached – sorry, field collected – by the large, aged caudex with a bark. In addition, all of the vines that would normally be growing out of the plant have been hacked away.

These big caudexes hold tons of energy for the plant, so it’s likely to try and grow for a while. Unfortunately, these poached plants are extremely hard to grow, and most die within a couple years. You may think it’s growing and establishing for you, but chances are, it’s just dying very slowly. It can take 2 years for these big caudex forming plants to run out of energy stored from when they grew in habitat, and if they’re not in conditions nearly identical to where they spent decades growing…they die.

Kal called out a trendy plant that has been one of my pet peeves for ages – the Stephania erecta, or potato plant.

Ya’ll. These are ALL poached.

It takes years – decades – for them to reach the sizes they’re sold at. There is no nursery in Thailand that’s been growing these for 10 years to have oodles of them to sell to you for two bucks a pop.

“But they said they’re legally collected!”

This circles back to the foundational part of Kal’s talk: being technically legal is not the same as not poached.

Also: I feel there is a very specific circle in hell for people who buy plants they know will die because “it looks cute”. Stephania erecta buyers will rub shoulders with those people who buy orchids just to stick them in windowless, dark bathrooms and wonder why they always die.

It’s up to you to educate yourself on the plants

Kal presented photo after photo of the plants being posted by poachers in their “nurseries” in their countries of “origin”, showing clearly poached plants all in dirt and “growing”.

But the thing is, the plants very clearly didn’t grow there.

Many of the big caudex forming succulents are dug up in one country, driven to another (often Tanzania), plopped in some dirt and then the country provides the phytosanitary certificate like this is totally normal and fine.

Plants like these Dioscoria mexicana, likely poached, showing their original vines hacked off and new ones growing in.

What often happens is these four plants would be placed in buckets or just in mounds of dirt, the local officials come by, check off “yes, these plants are in dirt here”, and the necessary paperwork is provided.

Then…the plants can be shipped wherever, including here to the US.

This happens with the big endangered plants, of course, but if we look back at our poor Stephania erecta, they weren’t even on the endangered species list before this! With thousands of those little caudex potatoes being collected and sold every year, they’re bound to be on the way to being endangered soon. 

If we as growers, as collectors, as plant lovers, really want to claim to be ethical stewards of the plant life we cherish, we need to be diligent about not supporting poachers and wild or field collected plants. We’ve already seen the aftermath of what happens when people take “just one or two” for themselves with no regard for the population.

The more popular or rare the species, the more at risk it is for overcollection by obsessed enthusiasts. This overcollection has led to dozens of species being nearly extinct in the wild, despite availability in private collections.

nnAbsolutely.  Are we all just awful or can we change this? 

Kal’s talk wrapped with actionable things we can do, which was where it started to get spicy. 

While we can all agree that Poaching is Bad, what do we do about people who used to poach but don’t anymore? What about club rules that have changed in recent years to forbid any sort of field collected plants being shown or sold? What about when rules change so that you can’t even post a field collected plant on your page? 

This is where the conversation does get more nuanced for us as a community. 

Kal proposed that in addition to pressuring your local club to not allow the show or sale of field collected plants, the SDCSS policy of “you aren’t welcome if you also promote them on social media or sell them elsewhere” was an even better next step. 

I agree. To be transparent, I was one of the board members who voted for that proposal to amend our vendor contract, so of course I agree. 

An interesting step that he proposed further was to not picture these plants on social media at all, and to not bring them to club events or otherwise showcase them. If someone does have a field collected plant and now knows better, they should keep that plant as a personal specimen, not broadcast it, and instead strive to care for it well and propagate or generate seeds if they can. 

On that, I disagree – sort of. 

We shouldn’t keep idolizing field collected plants as achievable specimens we can find a way to get into our collections. They shouldn’t be held up as these incredible, highly coveted examples that you can get if you can just manage to spend enough money. On that, I agree. Stop reposting these things on social media! 

But I do think we need to make it possible for people to learn to identify what a field collected plant looks like. We need to shift the education about these plants the way we’ve shifted education about animals like whales or elephants or apes: while yes, they can be grown in cultivation, if you really want to see them “as they are”, it’s worth that trip to see them in the wild. 

Think of it like orcas in the 80s and 90s. We loved seeing them at Sea World, and it was so incredible to see the shows! Dolphins doing tricks in other tanks, orcas leaping, it was all so amazing to go see. 

But now, in the 2020s, we’ve learned more about what they need. We’ve learned how dolphins and orcas and other smaller whales are captured to be put on display. We’ve learned how complex their social structure is, and no one thinks it’s natural or ideal to have these animals in captivity.

Is it still incredible to see them? Absolutely. Does seeing them still serve a conservation purpose for folks who may not have encountered them before? Absolutely.  

Should we go get more of them for those purposes? No, of course not. 

Are we holding these captive animals up as something ideal, that every city should have an aquarium with these in it? Of course not. 

Now, we’re never going to get something like Free Willy to shift sentiment around a cactus. Sadly, Ariocarpus cannot be trained to do tricks, and your Adenium would really just like to stay where it’s at, thankyouverymuch. 

But…we can change the narrative around seeing a particularly cool specimen. We can turn it into a wistful thing to see, a shameful thing if someone’s actually gone out to get one for themselves. 

It’s not “you can never get this.” 

It’s “what a shame this is here. To see them, you really need to go visit X place.” 

My day job is marketing, so of course, I have a pretty strong opinion about the value of words in this fight.

But I suspect that if we continue to make poached plants and field collected plants into something that is a shame to see in cultivation, rather than a point of pride, we’ll shift the sentiment in a more meaningful way.

In addition, keeping them visible, showing new enthusiasts what to look for, and keeping them as an educational tool – that should be valued, not hidden away. If more of our established, experienced growers were honest about how hard it is to acclimate a field collected plant, maybe fewer new folks would try.

There was so much to unpack in this talk! 

It was so good and such a breath of fresh air of a new perspective and extremely interesting topic. By the end of the talk, there was some heated debate – which signals the sort of touchy topic that should be discussed, not brushed under the rug. 

If you’re a member of a Southern California club and have the opportunity, I highly encourage you to ask your club to invite Kal to speak. He was honest and forthright about his experience, direct about actions to take, and the talk itself was genuinely interesting. It’s one of very few I’ve stayed to the end for, and was worth every minute. 

Does your club invite speakers to talk about topics like conservation? What are your club meetings like? Let me know – message me on Instagram (@TrexPlants) or shoot me an email at [email protected]!