Horticulturists say producing lots of pitcher plants can conserve wild plants. Is it enough though, when ever more new species whet buyers’ appetites?
IN JULY 2023, a Filipino Facebook post appeared advertising the sale of a Malaysian tropical pitcher plant, Nepenthes berbulu. What was on sale were seeds, purportedly harvested on July 15. The thing is, this is a newly discovered species of pitcher plant from Malaysia’s Titiwangsa Mountains.
Its existence was made public a mere 4 months earlier in a scientific publication. The plant’s exact location was not disclosed and specimens were also only supposedly collected for research.
(Feature photo: Flooding the market with affordable propagated Nepenthes helps reduce pressure on wild plants. | Image: Bryan Yong)
Selling Nepenthes internationally is restricted under the CITES global trade agreement as this iconic plant is the single most poached family of carnivorous plants. But how well protected are Nepenthes in Malaysia if a brand-new species so quickly hit the online market?
The picture that emerges suggests weaknesses in trade protection as well as a lack of oversight of both botanical expeditions/tourism and the sources of ‘artificially cultivated’ plants for sale.
Carnivorous plants like Nepenthes (periuk kera in Bahasa Malaysia) have fans among hobby cultivators because of their superpower to capture, kill and consume animals. This community of carnivorous plant enthusiasts is large and spans the world.
And “it is this group that provides a market for—and is the only driver of—illegal collection”, according to restoration ecologist Adam T Cross in a 2020 research paper on the conservation status and threats to carnivorous plants.
Poaching is rampant
Cross says that globally, a quarter of species (45 out of 169) are threatened by poaching. A check by Macaranga found that at least 9 species are endemic to Malaysia.
Cross says these threats are alarming because carnivorous plants are important indicators of habitat degradation and changes to natural ecological processes, since they are often “the first species to disappear”.
Rare and unique species are in high demand by collectors, which makes new discoveries vulnerable.
Two years ago, Nepenthes researchers Tan Hong Liang and Gideon Lim collected specimens of a new species from the Titiwangsa Mountains. Named after the fleshy bristles on the lower surface of the pitcher lid, the N. berbulu is found only on 5 peaks.
The pair spent a month in the highlands as part of a 20-member international expedition of researchers, tourists and guides, funded by UK-based publisher and ecotourism operator RedFern Adventures. The researchers published the new species in March 2023, careful not to disclose its exact location.
When the N. berbulu-for-sale Facebook post popped up, the researchers were upset, says Lim. The photo used in the post was from the expedition. Lim contacted the seller anonymously. After to-ing and fro-ing, he surmised that the seeds are likely fake because the plant’s description was inaccurate.
Who leaked the photo, or worse, took seeds?
Dr Mohd Norfaizal Ghazali is the lead taxonomist and deputy director at the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI).
He has led multiple research expeditions to uncover new species in the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, and collaborates with freelance researchers to collect pitcher plants for research.
Faizal thinks that the N. berbulu mishap is due to the researchers not being fully transparent about their intentions on their Forestry Department research and collection permit applications.
Permits in hand
In response, Lim disclosed to Macaranga all their approved research permits from the federal and state forestry departments. He explained that the permits were to allow them to publish and collect samples legally from the field.
However, Lim’s expedition also included non-researchers who participated through RedFern. But he said, “Not all the other persons like the RedFern tourists and local guides are authors to our paper – although they are mentioned in credits – and so they do not need to apply [for] a research permit.”
He avers that every participant’s name was listed in the hiking permit, for which “the local guides helped them to apply”. Macaranga did not sight the hiking permit.
This is not good enough for MARDI’s Faizal. He urges the Forestry Department to ramp up its enforcement of forest entry and export permits to curb poaching. Macaranga reached out to the Department for a comment but did not get a response.
The Malaysian government has actually been proactive in protecting Nepenthes by targeting international trade: poaching is heavily fuelled by overseas demand.
High up in Sabah’s Mt Kinabalu and Mt Tamboyukon grows the world’s largest carnivorous plant, N. rajah. Its pitchers can hold over 3 litres of liquid, large enough to trap and digest rats.
According to The Kew Magazine (1991), since its discovery in 1851, collectors and botanists have been uprooting N. rajah for their collections.
Banning trade
But poaching stripped so much from the mountains that in 1981, Malaysia got the plant listed in Appendix I of The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). This makes it illegal to trade wild plants internationally.
However, that did not work: sellers merely cut off its pitchers, making it impossible to tell it apart from all other Nepenthes.
To save it and other Nepenthes under threat, 6 years later, Malaysia got Appendix II listings for all Nepenthes not listed on Appendix I. Appendix II plants may only be traded internationally under strict conditions.
But Appendix I plants like N. rajah can actually be traded too – if they are artificially propagated by licensed cultivators. All N. rajah collected prior to the CITES restrictions in 1981, could be used as breeding stock for artificial propagation.
The idea to mass produce Nepenthes took root.
Wildlife photographer and biologist Chien Lee recalls that when N. rajah was regularly poached from Mount Kinabalu in 1996, it was sold for USD300—500 (RM750—1,250) per plant. In under 10 years, the species was so mass-propagated that the price dropped to as little as USD10 (RM35).
“You can’t compete with that by digging wild plants.”
Churning them out
The horticultural industry certainly believes in conservation by cultivation.
“I think it’s important because without artificial propagation that we had done [long] before, we [won’t] have so many varieties to share with growers and the enthusiasts,” says Juliana Chong. Chong is sales manager at Malesiana Tropicals, which developed Malaysia’s first tissue culture laboratory propagating Nepenthes in 1998.
Tissue culture can produce millions of identical plants, theoretically forever. The Kuching nursery grows species from Sabah and Sarawak as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Lee himself collected wild Nepenthes seeds for Malesiana Tropicals through licensed botanical expeditions until 2003.The nursery has successfully cultivated around 150 Nepenthes varieties, including species and hybrids.
At its peak, it was selling 5,000 – 6,000 plants per month for its clients in the US, Japan, EU, Australia, and Taiwan. These remain the main sources of demand.
Today, the lab’s mainstay is agriculture, but it remains the country’s biggest supplier of artificially propagated Nepenthes. It is a profitable business but the company says it is part of their mission to conserve these species through their collection.
Chong points out that besides poaching, the plants’ habitats are increasingly destroyed through deforestation; she is glad “’we salvaged all the varieties before they’re gone.”
In the Klang Valley, a smaller Nepenthes commercial cultivator, agrees. “Leave whatever you have there [in the wild], take some, put outside, show to people, so that the ones who cannot go inside the forest can see [them],” says Mohd Fauzi Abu Bakar of 4Z E Plant.
After 23 years, he himself has amassed 50, or a third of Nepenthes species.
This collection includes N. khasiana, an IUCN critically endangered and CITES Appendix I species native to India. He says he imported the mother plants from the Borneo Exotics nursery in Sri Lanka and propagated them as exhibition plants for a government-supported tourist attraction.
Sri Lanka is the world’s largest supplier of artificially propagated Nepenthes, and Borneo Exotics is a big trader.
Current inventory
But in an email, managing director Robert Cantley denies selling N. khasiana to Fauzi. “We don’t stock [it] and it’s not on our inventory”. Fauzi provided invoice numbers for the plant to Macaranga which we emailed to Cantley but have not received a reply.
The provenance of ‘propagated plants’ is indeed difficult to prove. And illegal trade is rampant: in 2021, US Customs seized 9 species of Nepenthes that were couriered from Malaysia without paperwork.
Worse, propagation in the place of protecting plants in the wild may send the misguided message to collectors that every species should be propagated, says Lee. “They think that this is the way to save a species from extinction – by removing them from their natural habitats.”
The appetite for the next new shiny species also means that propagation cannot keep up with demand. N. berbulu popped up online within 4 months of its publication. “Even if it is fake, it does not discount the fact that there is interest in this plant,” says Lim.
Fauzi’s customers are clamouring for new species such as N. domei and N. malayensis, which were described in 2020. Respectively Vulnerable and Critically Endangered, artificially propagated specimens of these new species are not on the market yet.
Explains Lee, “It’s going to take a few years from when you first get the seeds to when you’ve propagated enough plants that you can start to release them to satisfy the collectors’ demand.”
Because of the high prices offered by hobbyists overseas, locals are willing to scale dangerous heights to collect wild plants, says researcher Tan Hong Liang, who was on the N. berbulu expedition. Then, illegal sellers show up in Facebook groups and pasar malam (night markets) in rural areas.
Tan thinks enforcement is weak and counterintuitive. While scientists struggle to get clearance to explore and document new species, he says loose border controls mean tourists can just cross into the country; when they leave, they are only infrequently checked for poached species.
CITES weaknesses
Tan also has issues with the effectiveness of CITES as a deterrent as it takes too long for new species to be listed. A check by Macaranga on the CITES checklist drew blanks on the 5 new Peninsular Malaysia species described in the last 5 years.
What’s more, hybrids are not listed in CITES either. Hybrids, or crosses between different species, commonly occur naturally and are also widely propagated in nurseries for features that meet market demand.
For example, for a big trader like Sri Lanka’s Borneo Exotics, “the vast majority of our exports are hybrids we bred ourselves of just 4 varieties that we export in bulk to the Dutch,” says Cantley.
“This swamps the numbers for species Nepenthes which are very tiny indeed by comparison (a small fraction of one percent of our exports are species).”
Legal provenance
He emphasises that all their plants are artificially propagated from tissue culture, and “the original material that the tissue culture is derived from was legally obtained many years ago. We are the only nursery in the world to be able to claim that with Nepenthes.
“All others are using material that is derived originally from wild origin, nearly always collected without any sort of permission or permit.”
Cantley also chairs the Carnivorous Plant Specialist Group of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. The group reviews assessments of Nepenthes’ conservation status, which is the basis for CITES decisions.
At the end of the day, artificial propagation is effective, but not a silver bullet against poaching, says Lee. “Unfortunately, some collectors still want wild, collected plants, .. something that’s different from everybody else, .. not something from the laboratory.”
Worse is the twisted logic of ‘saving’ the plants from the native countries. “Like I have seen it written online in forums that people are saying, ‘Oh, Malaysians don’t know how to take care of their biodiversity. So we’re going to take it.’ It is really horrible and really patronising.”
Much to do
Lee and other conservationists call for improving management and enforcement of both plants and their habitats as well as more effective oversight of research, botanical tourism and trade.
As at press time, the N. berbulu Facebook post is still up. In fact, just 2 days ago, another post was put up showcasing a magnificent photo of the N. berbulu in the wild. Next to the seller’s name is a smiley and the words “feeling excited”.
Check out the unique and mind-boggling attributes of Nepenthes that make them such a draw among hobbyists globally: The World of Nepenthes. Both these stories follow from wildlife trade media training organised in 2023 by the US Agency for Global Media which Macaranga co-led.
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