A bright January afternoon in 2014, the sunlight slants through the panels of the Princess of Wales Conservatory in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Where even in the dead of winter, preparations are underway for the Annual Orchid Festival. 10 climate controlled zones display a magnificent array of rare and remarkable plants from across the planet. As the staff busy themselves readying for the big event an apprentice is doing
the rounds, checking the water levels in the ponds. Somewhere near the concrete bridge, he stops in his tracks, all around him is the hubbub of visitors and busy staff. But his focus is chained on one thing, a small hole in the abundant flora, the scraper fingers, almost visible in the mud. Holding his breath he leans in, but he already knows what's missing.
When you find that someone has acted illegally, unlawfully and selfishly in stealing one element of that collection, particularly something as valuable as this plant, it's very disappointing.
Missing from the mud was one of 24 specimens of Nymphaea thermarum, one of the world's most endangered species. The world's smallest and rarest waterlily. Its delicate white flowers are now extinct in the wild. And Kew is one of the few botanic gardens in the world to be guardian of this species, which had once lived in Rwandan hot springs.
The high price of these individual plants and the rarer they are, although there's a risk of being caught, there's very little prosecution and jail time. And the fines are minuscule compared to the prices that these items are actually sold at the end.
I'm James Wong and I'm a botanist. In this series I'm unraveling the secrets of the world of plants and fungi, from one tiny waterlily to the pre- historic giants hidden in multi- million pound mansions. We'll find out about the criminal underworld that threatens to devastate entire species and the future of our planet.
Wildlife trafficking has surged in recent years, generating billions in illicit profits. Criminals are helping themselves to the environment's precious resources without a care for the cost to our planet.
The scale of the internet is a real challenge for the monitoring and surveillance of wildlife crime. It's still important to involve human judgment in these decisions.
You're listening to Unearthed: Mysteries from an unseen world, from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Kew's tropical nursery is a huge partitioned glass house split into 21 different climatic zones. It's home to 10,000 plants, and it's the most diverse collection of cultivated plants on the planet. This is where a talented team, tends plants behind the scenes and where many
waterlilies begin their Kew journey. It's from this oasis of life that the specimens visitors see in the gardens are often born. It was here that the ideal conditions for Nymphaea thermarum were decoded by Kew's botanical horticulturist, Carlos Magdalena. Known to some as the plant Messiah, due to his ability
to coax plants back from the brink of extinction. Fast forward a few years and some of the rare waterlilies now extinct in the wild, run show at the Princess of Wales Conservatory. Richard Barley is Director of Horticulture Learning and Operations at Kew. He arrived in 2013 and it was not long after this, that the waterlily theft took place.
The story of the Rwandan waterlily is a really interesting one. It only grew in the natural habitat at one location in Rwanda on the edge of a thermal spring. Just in the sort of moist mud with a thin film of water. They send some seed across here to Kew. And I think that was in about 2008, 2009. And that's when one of our own horticulturist here, Carlos Magdalena did a number of trials with the seed that it
germinated, it grew, it stayed alive. And then we were able to multiply the numbers of plants and ultimately finish up with a really good collection. So at least we'd preserve the material and the plant, which was by then extinct in the wild. It had disappeared, I think in about 2008, but we still then had saved the plant from becoming extinct altogether.
It really is so distinct, as soon as you look at it. It's like, honey, I shrunk the kids kind of got the Ray gun and aim that at a waterlily.
Yeah.
And it doesn't grow with its parts floating on the surface of water. It just grows in mud.
Yeah, that's right.
What's it like when you've spent years, maybe even decades in some situations trying to conserve a particular species and then notice that, that has been stolen.
Look, its always disappointing. I mean, I'm sure it'd be the same with anyone working with any valuable collection of anything at all. When you find that someone has acted illegally unlawfully and selfishly in stealing one element of that collection, particularly something as valuable as this plant.
Were you surprised when you found out it was missing?
Yes, I was. Honestly, I think any plant theft surprises me because I inherently always think the best of people at large and don't expect something like that to happen. And also frankly, I was surprised because it was not right next to a pathway. You could just be walking along, bend down and scoop it up. It did require someone to traverse some fairly soft going and to get to the edge of a pond and get it and get
it out and not be noticed doing that. These conservatories are not left empty during the day. They have people in them. As I said earlier, we need to tell the stories of why those plants are rare, because ultimately we want all our visitors and the wider community to understand the importance of looking after biodiversity around the world.
We want them to know what the issues are. And if that means they make some sensible decisions about anything in their lives, then that's been a very positive outcome.
This story is far from lighthearted or eccentric. In reality, a multi- million pound trade in plant trafficking is seeing rare species ripped from their natural habitats. Mules, employed to break the law and species smuggled without regard to consequences for disease, sustainability and life on earth. So the question is who would steal an endangered plant? I met up with Carley Cowell. Carley is Kew Senior Science Policy advisor
for the CITES team. You might want to remember that acronym CITES, because you're going to hear a bit more of it. CITES is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna. Bit of a mouthful, so you can see why they needed a snappier title.
South Africa is a biodiversity hotspot. One of the smallest plant kingdoms in the world, being only in a single country, whereas there's other plant kingdoms that span continents, and this just leads to that element of being rare and
having a high status. And when I was living and working there, my role was to go and to search for these rare plants and to locate them, check their population, see that they were surviving in the wild and that they were healthy. And there were no threats to them. The conservation, the
basic form of conservation. What we did find unfortunately, was that there was the dark side of things where people wanted to then collect these rare plants and sell them for their rarity. We would often find that we'd go to a population, count the numbers, and then return to go back and see if they'd set seed or some. And they were gone. They'd been collected, ripped out the
ground. There were just holes left. Taken to garden centers or collectors in South Africa, but a lot for export to the states, Europe and Singapore. We were aware of an individual who'd come through from Eastern Europe and was traveling in South Africa, had been known to collect reptiles
illegally, and we were tracking him. And the news came that he had entered a national park and that he was in the vicinity and we tracked him down and got to his guest house. We searched and in his bathroom, we found over 2000 succulent plant species. We found reptiles, snakes and lizards, but plants. An entire bathroom with
2000 meticulously labeled and packaged. It was just unbelievable, but it was gut wrenching at the same time, because he was not a botanist and a conservationist. If you collect something as a botanist, you take the locality, you know where it came from, because you'd like to go back and see if the rest of the population, because you wouldn't take an entire population was still thriving. These plants were just taken.
Carly is often found in Kew's Jodrell laboratory, working with teams in the wood anatomy lab and the taxonomist as well. She's also regularly based in Kew's millennium seed bank at Wakehurst and works closely with government departments. She is passionate that we can change our attitude to what's green and unseen.
I think growing up in South Africa and seeing the species in the wild ray and common plants and just ecosystems functioning on a more natural level, I want others to experience that. I want it to remain as it is. My belief is that we are custodians for the earth. We are to look after it and guard it and let it function as it is meant to be. It's not for us to plunder and pillage and use for
our own personal gain, come what may for nature. That's my driving factor. I want to be a custodian. I want to protect the earth and I want generations to come to experience what I've experienced.
So one of the things that I find really intriguing is how do these plants smuggling networks operate? Like how do they operate on the ground?
From my past experience of working in conservation and particularly protected areas, they function the same way as any illegal crime syndicates would function. You've got the kingpins at the top with lots of money, supplying a demand for something rare and highly valuable. And it filters down to those who are actually on the ground doing poaching, are often the poor poverty- stricken people who are desperate, who don't
have other options in society. And don't have a fallback from government for funding. So they are the ones actually putting their lives on the line and going out and doing the poaching.
It's quite difficult. It's a network of organized crime, that's really analogous to things like the trade in drugs, for example. And it can be almost impossible for non- geeks to think about plants as being that valuable.
The ones we're talking about are newly discovered species, species on the brink of extinction, where there's only a handful. And what I mean by a handful, I mean like literally five. As in five fingers, that's left. So they become sought after, a bragging right for these collectors that have them. I've got one of the last remaining 15 plants. So they put this value on them that is just exorbitant and
is unrealistic. When you think of the fact that you could mass produce them like the ones in the garden center and everyone could have, but then you wouldn't have that status of owning that rare plant. It's soul destroying at a level. You feel you've failed them in the wild. There's a term known as plant blindness, which is
prevalent across the world through all societies. As humans, we've evolved from being chased by things that could eat us. So we needed to actually see them coming first, rather than the green plants, which weren't so much of a threat. So we phase out the green into the background and we look for things that are moving or bright colors or hairy. So we're blind to plants. They're just
there. They always have been and they always will be.
These are organized criminal networks, and that can have a very human cost when plants may be worth millions of pounds. The consequences to conservationists on the ground, trying to protect both can be illness. Like I understand you have experience of this in national parks in Mozambique.
Yes, I personally wasn't there, but I had colleagues that we work closely with on the Kruger National Park, Mozambique border. The rangers protecting very rare cycads that grow in Mozambique and across the border in South Africa, were being poached. And they were being shot at, and people lost their lives because of protecting rare plants.
So apart from orchids and cacti, cycads are this other group of plants where there's a massive business.
Yes. So cycads hold the dubious title of being some of the oldest plants in the world. They're known as living fossils. And they were around during the Jurassic period with the dinosaurs. They probably covered the entire earth, but now they're just stuck in a few pockets, clinging onto
the edge of survival. They're highly sought after. They're extremely old and the older the cycad and the fewer they are of its kind, the price is then a lot higher. And we're talking hundreds of thousands of pounds to millions, depending on the species, its rarity and its age.
The high price of these individual plants and the older they are and the rarer they are, although, there's a risk of being caught, there's very little prosecution and jail time. And the fines are minuscule compared to the prices that these items are actually sold at the end. The people who know the plants and love them and have studied them, don't get paid very well for it. It's not
a high profile, highly paid job. So they do sometimes turn to the illegal trade where they can then use their skills and expertise to sell these plants on to those collectors who will pay thousands or millions for them.
Thanks for listening to Unearthed. I'll be back again in just a minute, but first here's a message from our supporter, Kim Katra.
As a charity, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew is facing a severe funding crisis right now. The impact of coronavirus has created a financial shortfall of 15 million pounds. This money is vital for the upkeep of these beautiful botanic gardens and crucial to continuing its global conservation work. Plants and fungi hold many of the answers to the world's biggest challenges such as climate change, food security and biodiversity
loss. And Kew needs to play a role in furthering the science and identifying desperately needed solutions. If there's one positive thing that could come out of this pandemic, it will be to encourage each and every one of us to look afresh and with urgency at these global challenges. If you are enjoying this podcast and feel inspired by the work that Kew does, please go to kew.org to
donate today. To help not only protect Kew, but also preserve the future of our planet.
Accidental crime can happen when people aren't used to thinking about the global impact of small actions, but what about the more conscious and perhaps more sinister trade. A global illegal plant trade doesn't respect the natural population, habitat or biodiversity of a species. I spoke to Guy Clark at the UK Border Force at Heathrow airport.
I've been doing this work for approximately 25 years. And before that I ran a drugs anti- smuggling team at Heathrow for 10 years before that. So my whole career is mainly airport based with a few visits to the UK ports thrown in. Some of the more unusual items we've seized. We've had tins of soup made from sea turtles and the sea turtle is listed on appendix one
of CITES. So there's no commercial trade. We've had motor vehicles made here in the UK that have been exported abroad and all the leather inside was crocodile skin. And they didn't have any of the right CITES permits because all crocodiles and alligators are controlled. So not only your expensive handbags, but any skin items and-
But just the idea of not knowing where to look. If someone was exporting a car, I just would never, ever have imagined that UK Border Force would need to look at it.
Now, what varies in the detection side of things is not just the illegal wildlife trade. It's drugs, its illegal migrants, it's conflict diamonds. So we have a wide range of duties, but we do have a number of the more unusual tasks allocated to us, dealing with the restricted parts and animals, is one of those where the large numbers
of species controlled under the CITES convention. Now there's about 28, 000 plants and trees controlled under the CITES convention and round about 7, 000 animals. We know where our high risk countries of origin are. We know where high risk plant and timber species come from. So we can narrow down our controls and focus and deploy to those flights or those ships that bring in containers or flights that bring in air
cargo and mail for the high risk countries. So for plants where we're talking about Southeast Asia, India, sometimes the United States. So we can focus in on those areas that we know are high risk. And with our intelligence exchanges, that helps make our job a bit easier. It is difficult.
So how does the Border Force work with Kew?
We rely on the botanists at Kew to identify the species, particularly orchids. Now, there's a large number of orchid species from Southeast Asia that have the highest levels of protection under CITES. So there should be no commercial trade in these species. When we see a plant, it's probably going to have no indication of what the species is.
It'll just be wrapped up in newspaper. So we have had occasions where it's taken two or three months before the plant has actually flowered before the botanists are able to determine the exact species. We have had a commercial importer who was smuggling appendix one, orchids in his suitcases
through terminal three. And he got a custodial sentence for three months in prison on each of the charges, when the botanists at Kew or Peter Gasson, the wood anatomist. Now they will do their examinations and should a case go to court and the orchid case that I referred to earlier. It was the first time an impact statement had been
prepared by a scientific institution in a UK court. The impact statement is now used in all wildlife cases, both here in the UK now and abroad. And that actually provides the court with information about the damage the smugglers are causing by taking the plants from the wild in
their range states. If you're going to buy plants, it's much better to buy plants from nurseries, approved nurseries that have got a chain of documentation to show where their products originated rather than digging plants up in the wild. Not only do you damage the environment there, but you risk bringing disease and other pests into the UK when you smuggle them through. And no one really wants that.
The global wood industry has seen a boom. This in demand oil found in fragrances and cosmetics can be purchased for a small fortune on the high street. It's created from the wood chips or shavings of Agarwood, a resonance timber found at the hardwood of Aquilaria Chis native to Southeast Asia. When trees are infected by a certain mold, it turns the wood dark and the tree then creates
a strongly centered resin to protect itself. Tips from these infected hardwoods are used to create the purist extract, but the leftover shavings can be used to make a lower quality, less intense oil too. High value is placed upon wild sources of the soil, but this hasn't been without its problems. And over- harvesting has led to habitat loss and international monitoring of the wood trade. Carly told me more.
Many cultures are being spread around the world and the elements of this oil are it's so potent. You only need a few drops in the base of a fragrance for it to last for ages and to be fantastic. It's the best I can describe it. The thing is that to produce this oil, certain trees known as Agarwood trees actually have to be infected by a certain fungus. So they get a wound, a tree loses a branch in
a storm and it gets infected. And the infection actually forms this oil, which is then extracted and only 2% of trees that are infected, even produce this oil. So it's very rare and it's just escalated from being very rare in the trees and being harvested to being very potent. And therefore with those two factors that it's a really good oil and it's also rare, the price is astronomical.
It's roughly about 1000 pounds for 500 moles of the essence of the oil.
Carly and her Kew colleagues are also actively engaged in good old fashioned intelligence work to track and intercept illegal plant trading in other places. I caught up with David Whitehead from Kew's conservation policy team. He's been working on a project called Flora Guard, which sees teams from Kew, the University of Southampton, criminologists and computer scientists, all joining forces to combat wildlife crime on the web.
It might be natural to assume that wildlife cyber crime is taking place in these sort of more secretive parts of the internet, the deep web or the dark web. But in fact, studies have shown that, that's a rarity. The vast majority takes place on the surface web.
And this awareness is important, because many people engaging in this trade may have absolutely no idea, both from a buyer and seller side that what they're doing is illegal. So how do you even go about this tracking with your team? Because with the pure number of entries on online search engines, it must be so difficult. You must be talking about literally billions of entries that you'd have to trail through.
The scale of the internet is a real challenge for monitoring and surveillance of wildlife crime. And Flora Guard has tried to address this challenge by bringing together sophisticated web searching and information extraction tools, which fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence or AI.
So you literally have robot police officers, well, not... Yeah, literally, and also figuratively.
Perhaps to some extent, it's still important to involve human judgment in these decisions, particularly with an area as complex as wildlife crime. It's very difficult to prove illegality. You have to read between the lines slightly. So keeping a human in the loop we might say is also important. So the Flora Guard methodology combines AI, web searching and information extraction tools with human analysis and judgment as well.
Because there's always a human story at the other end behind it. There's a human story behind the poaching. There's a human story behind what drives people to collect these plants and buy and sell them. And understanding that is important as well, to help formulate softer interventions to raise awareness or change perceptions or perhaps reduce demand for these species.
Our exploration of the secret world of plant crime leaves me more curious than ever as to the psychology of the modern day plant collector. Where poachers and mules may be motivated by hefty or much needed financial rewards, just what is it that drives someone who values a plant so highly to paradoxically risk the future of the species so
that they may have it as their own. And the team at Kew are more torn than ever between their passion to share many of these incredible plants with the public and their duty to protect them from theft, damage or even extinction. How can we move forward to create a world where respect for plants extends to an understanding
of how individual actions can impact entire ecosystems? Perhaps when we have a culture where the green is more visible and people are educated on the crucial role that plants play, we'll be able to better protect life on earth. So whose place is it to speak for plants?
I think it's everyone's. Everyone who interacts with plants should be speaking for them and recognizing them and dismissing the plant blindness and valuing them more. There's support for wildlife crime of animals in mess, but there's no fund for cycads, for developing countries to get these agricultural systems going, that could produce these plants that are highly sought after and being pillaged from the wild.
In the meantime, life looks set to get a lot trickier for illegal plant traders. Thanks to the intelligence work, there's fighting to keep plants where they're supposed to be. Next time on Unearthed, from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
She was in possession of the raw material, with evidence that it was in the Curry. So if we could put every bit of the stage together, enable the police to have a pretty solid case.
We'll find out how a love spurns murderer was brought to justice, thanks to the plant detectives here at Kew. Make sure you don't miss it by subscribing on your podcast app now. Share this episode with a hashtag Kew Unearthed and follow us at Kew Gardens on social media. I'm James Wong. Thanks for listening.