Focus on Arts and Ecology

Data from 300,000 births reveal how essential biological measurements are altered by carrying and delivering a baby. 

By Celeste Biever, 26 March 2025

Biologists have built up one of the most detailed pictures ever of the changes that occur in women’s bodies before and after pregnancy, by pooling and studying around 44 million physiological measurements from more than 300,000 births.

The gigantic study1, which used the anonymized results of blood, urine and other tests taken before, during and more than a year after pregnancy, reveals the scale of the toll that carrying a baby and childbirth take on the body — from the myriad changes made to support a fetus to the effects of its abrupt departure from the body during birth. The research was published in Science Advances on 26 March.

The study suggests that the postnatal period in the body is much longer than people tend to assume, says Jennifer Hall, who researches reproductive health at University College London. There’s a societal expectation that you bounce back quickly after childbirth, she says. “This is like the biological proof that you don’t.”

The results also suggest that it might be possible to identify women at risk of certain common complications of pregnancy — including the blood-pressure condition pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes — before conception. Currently, these conditions are diagnosed during pregnancy.

The power of data

The researchers used anonymized data from medical records supplied by Israel’s largest health-care provider, and spanning the period from 2003 to 2020. To build up a picture of a typical pregnancy, they used test results only from women aged 20–35 years who were not taking medication or experiencing chronic disease.

The team gathered results from 76 common tests — including measures of cholesterol, immune cells, red blood cells, inflammation and the health of the liver, kidneys and metabolism — taken up to 4.5 months before conception and up to 18.5 months after childbirth. This allowed them to establish average values for each test for every week in that period.

“It took my breath away to see that that every test has this dynamical profile that is so elaborate, week by week, and has never been seen before,” says Uri Alon, a systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute for Science in Rehovot, Israel, who led the study.

The researchers found that, in the first month after birth, 47% of the 76 indicators stabilized close to their pre-conception values. But 41% of the indicators took longer than 10 weeks to stabilize. These included several measures of liver function and cholesterol that took around six months to settle, and an indicator of bone and liver health, which took a year (see ‘The body’s slow recovery from childbirth’). The remaining 12% took 4–10 weeks to stabilize.

Several measurements — including a marker for inflammation and several indicators of blood health — settled but did not return to their pre-conception levels even after 80 weeks, when the study ended. Whether such long-lasting differences result from pregnancy and birth themselves or from behaviours changing after the arrival of a child is a question for future research, say the scientists.

The researchers classed the indicators into four groups according to their trajectories. Some measures rose during pregnancy, then dropped post-partum; others did the opposite. Others still didn’t just drop or rise to meet pre-conception levels: they over- or undershot their pre-pregnancy values at delivery, before settling at roughly their pre-conception levels. That could be explained by the body ‘overcompensating’ for changes.

Pre-conception changes

The scientists found distinct changes in the body that began even before conception. Some of these — including a reduction in a marker of inflammation and increases in folic acid — were beneficial. The researchers attribute this to the tendency for people to take supplements and live more healthily when trying to conceive.

The researchers also isolated tests from women who developed complications that are currently not diagnosed until pregnancy, including gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, a condition that results in high blood pressure and can be life-threatening. They found that these women had different profiles for certain markers compared with tests from healthy pregnancies, and in some cases, the differences were most significant before conception.

This finding is exciting, says Hall, because it raises the possibility of being able to identify and help women at risk of these conditions before they conceive.

The findings show the power of anonymized biomedical information to uncover fresh insights, says Alon. His team is now taking a similar approach to studying menopause. “We can ask any statistical question we want,” he says. “It's like paradise.”

References

(Sources: Nature)

Study finds genetic imprints in three generations of Syrian refugees. Researchers urge caution in interpreting findings and call for replication. 

By Miryam Naddaf, 28 March 2025

A study of families who have lived through conflict in Syria suggests that genetic imprints of their trauma have been passed to their children and grandchildren.

The research1 focuses on the controversial idea that trauma can leave ‘epigenetic marks’ on a person’s genes that can be passed onto following generations. Not all scientists agree that trauma can be inherited in this way and the mechanism for such inheritance is not known. But the latest research echoes studies of children of survivors of the genocide in Rwanda2 and the Holocaust3 that have turned up similar effects.

“This is a really great attempt to look at the biological imprint of intergenerational trauma,” says Rachel Yehuda, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. However, the study “should be seen as a proof of concept”, she adds. It does not explain whether or how such biological marks affect health or behaviour.

In the paper, published in Scientific Reports last month, researchers compared data from 10 families who fled violent events in Syria in the 1980s, and 22 families who fled after the uprising in 2011, with a control group of 16 Syrian families who had not been exposed to war-related violence. The team analysed epigenetic marks — chemical tags on DNA sequences that result from environmental factors including stress — in more than 850,000 DNA regions. Epigenetic marks do not alter DNA sequences but can affect how genes work.

The authors found that adults and children who had been directly exposed to violence in the 1980s and after 2011 had distinctive epigenetic marks in certain DNA regions. In the case of one woman who had witnessed violence in the 1980s, these tags persisted in her daughter and grandchildren. The researchers did not find any of these epigenetic marks among people in the control group. There were 131 participants in total.

The latest findings are “the first to identify epigenetic signatures of trauma across three generations in humans in a controlled research design”, says study co-author Rana Dajani, a molecular biologist at the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan. “Science is about little steps, and this is a little giant step in understanding epigenetic inheritance,” she adds.

Forty years of trauma

Syria’s people have experienced more than 40 years of almost continual trauma. In June 1979, then-president Hafez al-Assad unleashed a crackdown on an attempted rebellion, and in 1982, his troops bombed the city of Hama for days, killing up to 30,000 people.

One of the study participants, now a grandmother, who was pregnant with her daughter at the time, witnessed the crackdown. The study included nine other women whose mothers experienced the violence. Their children also participated in the research.

Of the study’s participants, 22 mothers and their 20 children witnessed a second period of violence, after the Syrian uprising in 2011. This was when then-president Bashar al-Assad, who fled the country last December, deployed the army and regime-affiliated militias against protesters. The mothers had 19 other children, born after the traumatic events who were also studied.

To understand whether trauma resulting from these violent events had left epigenetic marks, and whether these marks are passed down through the maternal germ line, Dajani and her colleagues focused on patterns of DNA methylation — an epigenetic mechanism in which DNA is tagged with methyl groups. It is one of “the most studied [processes] and we have the technology today to do it”, Dajani says.

Over five years, the researchers searched for study participants from Jordan’s Syrian communities. The team defined a traumatic experience of violence as being severely beaten or persecuted by authorities or militias, seeing a wounded person or fatality, or witnessing someone else being beaten, shot or killed.

They analysed DNA samples from participants’ cheek cells and found that children and women with first-hand traumatic experiences of violence in the 1980s and after 2011 had distinctive methylation tags on 21 DNA regions.

The analysis also revealed tags on 14 DNA regions in the grandmother who witnessed the 1980s violence, as well as in her daughter and grandchild. These tags were also present in the daughters and grandchildren who were the descendants of nine women who witnessed that violence.

“Looking at at least two — if not three or maybe even four — generations is really crucial. That’s not often done in humans,” says epigeneticist Michael Kobor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Memory reset

Researchers disagree on whether methylation marks on DNA can pass between generations. This is because during early stages of mammalian development, the genome undergoes the equivalent of a memory reset — a process known as epigenetic reprogramming — that clears out DNA methylation tags.

“All of these marks, almost all of them, are erased when the eggs hit the sperm,” says Kobor. “The biology just doesn’t support DNA methylation as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission,” he adds.

But recent studies4 in animals suggest that the methylation of some DNA sites “could escape being reprogrammed”, says Dajani.

Kobor says that there might be explanations other than inheritance to explain the presence of 14 methylation marks of trauma in offspring. There is “a possibility that the trauma of the mums is reflected in their parenting, and that then creates these marks in the next generation”, he says.

Another possibility, Kobor says, is that DNA sequences in offspring that are inherited maternally might react to environmental stress in similar ways to what was seen in the mother, and end up with the same methylation tags.

But Dajani notes that the families in the 1980s group of participants were not blood relatives. This makes it less likely that shared genetics or parenting effects alone produced the consistent methylation marks in all ten families, she says.

“There is a need to be cautious because of the tissue choice and the small sample size and the uncertain clinical implication,” says Yehuda. But the work is “ambitious”, and “it’s important when you get findings like this to try to replicate them”, she adds.

Dajani is now planning to explore the epigenetic signatures of traumatic events in four generations of Palestinians.

References

(Sources: Nature)

Activist Bill McKibben says Americans upset by the Trump administration’s gutting of U.S. climate efforts need to move beyond despair. In an interview with e360, he talks about rethinking the role of protest, the global push on clean energy, and why he sees reason for hope. 

By Elizabeth Kolbert • March 3, 2025

In the first six weeks of the new Trump administration, it’s become clear that the president intends to undo not just Joe Biden’s environmental legacy, but an entire generation’s worth of action on climate change. The administration has announced it is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. It has frozen Inflation Reduction Act grants, stopped issuing permits for offshore wind development, and declared an “energy emergency” to boost fossil fuel production. The White House appears to be preparing to go after the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which undergirds EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, while cutting EPA spending by 65 percent.

How should environmentalists respond? Activist and author Bill McKibben has been a leading voice on climate change since 1989, when he published The End of Nature, the first book on the subject aimed at a general audience. McKibben spoke to e360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert about the urgency of the moment, the role of protest, the future of clean energy, and where he sees glimmers of hope.

Elizabeth Kolbert: If you care about the future of the planet, what do you do at a time like this?

Bill McKibben: I think it’s fair to despair a little bit. I mean, we should acknowledge what a remarkable moment it is that the government of the most powerful country on Earth, at least for the moment, is rejecting flat-out the science that’s been developed over many decades, often by scientists working for the government, about the single most dangerous thing that’s ever happened in human history. And the level of irresponsibility, indeed just craziness, is off the charts.

The Inflation Reduction Act [the Biden administration’s signature climate law] represented the first significant act by the U.S. Congress to deal with climate science. It was a far from perfect bill, but powerful in many ways. So powerful that the fossil fuel industry needed to do what it could to shut it down and to shut down the energy transition to the extent that it could. And hence, the oil industry spent unprecedented sums of money — the number I saw most recently was $455 million — on the last election cycle.

I’d say the two slight saving graces are, one, as the U.S. retreats from leadership here, there are others, especially the Chinese, who have been stepping up to fill this vacuum. I have a lot of problems with the Chinese government and don’t particularly look forward to their hegemony. But on issues around energy, they’ve been more responsible than we have and built out most of the world’s clean energy at this point.

And the second saving grace is that though they can delay this energy transition, they can’t stop it. It’s rooted in the simple fact that we now live on a planet, as of the last three or four years, where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that won’t change. So, Americans may be denied some of the fruits of that technological revolution, and it will be delayed in ways that make the climate crisis far worse, but it’s not as if [the Trump administration] has complete control of this situation.

Kolbert: The moratorium that the Biden administration put on export permits for liquefied natural gas was a big climate win. You were very much a part of that. But now Trump seems to be using the threat of tariffs to get countries to increase their liquefied gas imports from the U.S.

McKibben: This scares me a ton. It’s one thing for us to derail our own energy future, and it’s another to try and derail everybody else with what is essentially a shakedown. My guess is that it’ll work in the short run, and it’ll backfire in the long run. Europeans have figured out in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine that it was foolish to be dependent on the good graces of Vladimir Putin for their energy supply. Anyone who puts themselves more under the thumb of Donald Trump than they need to is a fool.

Kolbert: You’ve indicated you are worried about civil disobedience as a form of climate activism, because instead of looking at a night in jail, people might now be looking at a year or more of jail, as some activists in the U.K. have gotten.

McKibben: I think that we need to continue to use all the tools that we have, and we will. But I do think that at the moment civil disobedience of the sort that we’ve been doing a lot of in recent years is unlikely to be particularly effective. I think that the Trump-MAGA world welcomes resistance of that kind. They like those kinds of fights. It energizes them. They’re cruel, and cruelty really is their kink in a lot of ways.

We’re gearing up to do this big national day of action in September. It’s called Sun Day. I think it’s going to be a huge celebration of possibility. And I think that that’s more dangerous right now to the MAGA agenda. They depend on people staying in a fearful crouch, convinced that whatever they have is under threat from somebody. And the idea of Sun Day, instead, is that we’re on the edge of this extraordinary possibility for solar. I’m excited about figuring out how we do huge parades of e-bikes, and inaugurate dozens of community solar farms, and have thousands of Americans opening their homes so their neighbors can see their heat pumps. And get millions of people who already have solar panels to put a green light in the window that night to tell everybody that they’re powered by the sun.

I sense in everyone’s despair and upset — all of which is completely justified and correct — a sort of hunger for some kind of joyful possibility, for something to rally around as well as stuff to rally against.

Kolbert: The Inflation Reduction Act put billions of dollars towards clean energy manufacturing. So far something like 80 percent of the manufacturing investments spurred on by the law have gone to red states. Do you see any payoff for that with support for clean energy in those states?

McKibben: I don’t know. The laws of normal political gravity in America don’t seem to be operating. That’s why we’re doing the Sun Day thing. We need to build again, and maybe from the ground up, a real constituency demanding action. And it’s got to include workers at that factory. It’s got to include solar panel installers. It’s got to include local officials who would like to keep energy money close to home instead of sending it off to Saudi Arabia.

Kolbert: There’s some hope that climate action will continue at the state and local level. Do you see that happening?

McKibben: There are lots and lots of things that localities can do to make things much easier. For example, it costs about three times as much to put solar on your roof in this country as it does in Europe or Australia. The panels are the same price. The soft costs, which are mostly around permitting and marketing, are much, much higher because we have this endless welter of regulations that gets in the way of what should be a very simple act: just giving someone a permit, if they should even require one, to put a solar panel, a safe thing, on their roof. And so those are the kinds of barriers that we can continue to knock away in blue states and blue cities and really in some red states.

Last year in Germany, a million and a half people put solar panels on their balconies of their apartments. And in many cases, those were supplying 20 percent of the electricity they used. You can’t do that in this country. You can’t go to IKEA the way you can in Germany and just buy a solar panel and hang it from your balcony and plug it in. It’s illegal. And those are the kind of things that can and should shift.

Kolbert: One of the things that the new administration really has taken a sledgehammer to is every environmental justice program.

McKibben: [Environmental justice] manages to combine the things they hate most in the world: clean energy and sensitivity to American history. It’s truly terrible. Just in terms of sheer honesty, we need to keep reckoning with the fact that the people who’ve done the least to cause the problems that we face suffer the most from them, here and around the world. And because these are people who are paying a huge percentage of their income for energy, in a rational world, that’s where we’d be concentrating this stuff first.

Kolbert: We also seem to be looking at the government potentially not doing any climate research under Trump.

McKibben: At this point we’ll be very lucky if we keep operating the observatory at Mauna Loa [in Hawaii, which measures global carbon dioxide levels]. It has provided the single most important scientific instrument in the history of the world. But if there’s any good news in this, it’s that most of the really crucial science has been done. It’s certainly a kick in the teeth to watch what’s going to happen at NOAA and every place else. But my prediction is that the­­ Chinese will pick up a lot of this slack, because they’ve understood that this is their ticket to some kind of moral high ground on this planet.

Kolbert: The U.S. has always had an uneven role in global climate negotiations, waffling in and out. But this time it feels different.

McKibben: You can make an argument that it might not be the worst thing in the world to have the U.S. out of the way, because we’re the reason that Kyoto didn’t work, we’re a big part of the reason that Copenhagen didn’t work, just on and on and on. And that’s a kick in the teeth because America is really where we learned about the climate crisis — it was from great research. And America is where the first wind turbine and the first solar cells and other key things came from. But, as I say, the slight silver lining to that cloud is we’ve been in many ways a stumbling block as much as a boost to getting anything done.

Kolbert: I’m wondering if you are feeling at all hopeful right now.

McKibben: In a world where there are a lot of bad things going on, the one overwhelming good thing is this sudden emergence of this possibility [of clean energy]— a possibility that I think most people haven’t fully recognized yet. Even those of us who want it still refer to it as alternative energy, and that’s no longer the truth. It’s not the Whole Foods of energy, pricey and a bit nice. It’s the Costco of energy: cheap, available in bulk on the shelf, ready to go.

Our species is now fully capable, in short order, of moving from an energy source that’s concentrated in a few hands in a few places to one that’s diffuse and ubiquitous, available everywhere. And I think that’s the most subversive and liberating possibility that we really have at the moment on this planet. And in the places that have started to do the work, we get the sense of what’s possible.

Kolbert: What are some of those places?

McKibben: California last year used 25 percent less natural gas than it did the year before to generate electricity. They reached a tipping point. They have enough batteries and enough solar panels out there that day after day they’re supplying more than 100 percent of their electricity renewably. And Texas is now putting up clean energy faster than California.

Pakistanis over the last three years imported enough solar panels to build out the equivalent of half their national electric grid. Truly amazing what happened inside of 12 months just because they had access to a lot of cheap Chinese solar panels. The same thing seems to be happening in parts of southern Africa.

And so those numbers — 25 percent less fossil fuel in a year — those are numbers big enough to take a bite out of the 3 degrees Celsius [of warming] that we’re aimed at right now. And I think this is the only way forward. I do not think humans are going to change their behaviors in large numbers in short order in ways that will reduce our emissions. I think this is the path.

South Africa’s Succulent Karoo is the most biodiverse arid region on the planet, with thousands of plants found nowhere else. But to meet a demand fueled by social media, criminal networks have been poaching these colorful succulents by the millions and smuggling them overseas.

By Adam Welz • March 6, 2025 

Tiny plants in plastic pots, each carefully labeled, cram a South African greenhouse. Each is the evidence of at least one crime. These are strange plants without typical stems or leaves. Some look like greenish thumb-tips, others like grapes or rounded stones. Some sprout small, bright flowers. Few are more than an inch tall. I’ve agreed not to disclose this location because the plants, confiscated from poachers and smugglers, are valuable and could be re-stolen by the same criminal networks that first dug them from their natural habitats to traffic overseas.

The plants come from a vast, arid, and thinly populated region that ecologists call the Succulent Karoo biome. It’s about the size of Kentucky and extends from southwestern Namibia into South Africa’s Northern Cape and Western Cape provinces. Most people would consider the Succulent Karoo a desert — it’s certainly hot, especially in summer, and gets very little rain — but it’s bursting with biodiversity.

The region’s vegetation is dominated by succulent plants, many of which take on bizarre, bulbous shapes for camouflage or for conserving water and periodically bloom in vivid yellows, oranges, reds, purples, pinks, or whites. Botanists have recorded about 6,400 species of native plants here, about 2,500 of them found nowhere else — far more than any other arid region of comparable size. The Succulent Karoo also has numerous unique insects and reptiles, including the world’s smallest tortoise species. About 8 percent of the South African part of this biome is formally protected.

From a car window, the Succulent Karoo can appear drab and barren. But get down on your hands and knees, and it transforms into a wonderland of living treasures — a wonderland that has in the last six years become the target of transnational smuggling networks focused on its unique flora. Millions of plants have been illegally dug from this area, resulting in the functional extinction of at least eight species, with hundreds more species being pushed toward the same fate. Hundreds of thousands of confiscated plants languish in greenhouses across South Africa. Despite the efforts of dedicated conservationists, solutions to South Africa’s plant poaching crisis remain elusive.

Interest in keeping southern Africa’s succulent plants isn’t new. Collectors from around the world have been digging up relatively small numbers of specimens here for as long as anyone can remember. By the mid 20th century, a few local nurseries were propagating and selling a wide variety of Succulent Karoo species, finding buyers both at home and abroad, particularly in the United States, Europe, and various East Asian countries. But nursery owners say the market began to change dramatically about 10 years ago.

“In 2014-2015, we experienced a big increase in demand from East Asia,” says Christine Wiese of Kokerboom Nursery, a long-established producer of succulent seed in the region. This was driven by young people who learned about the plants on the internet, she says, and soon she had a steady stream of visitors from South Korea, China, and Japan. “They were very knowledgeable,” she says. “They really wanted to see the plants in their natural form, and in the wild.” Many legally bought seed to take back to their home countries. Another nursery owner, who has been threatened by smugglers and asked not to be named, says buyers were particularly interested in “small, exceptional, and rare” plants, including some in the genus Lithops but particularly those in the genus Conophytum. (Lithops are called “living stones” because many look like small pebbles. Conophytum species often go by “dumplings,” “button plants,” or simply “conos.”) It’s possible to keep a large selection of these in a very small area, which suits people who live in apartments.

But in 2018, demand for seeds dropped off because foreign buyers, particularly in Asia, suddenly wanted very large numbers of mature plants, which, because they take between four and seven years to grow to a saleable size from seed, South African nurseries could not supply. And that’s when trouble in the Succulent Karoo began.

In 2019, South African law enforcement officers began interdicting unprecedented volumes of succulents that had been illegally harvested from the wild — sometimes thousands of plants at a time. They were found in vehicles at roadblocks, in courier company facilities, in homes, and warehouses. Most were Conophytum, of which there are nearly 200 known species and subspecies.

The situation worsened in 2020 with the onset of the Covid pandemic. Millions of people confined to their homes discovered social media “plantfluencers” who promoted houseplants, including many South African species. Chinese plantfluencers, in particular, drove a craze for conos, some of which were selling for hundreds of dollars apiece. (Conophytums are typically very slow-growing, and plants of some species can live to be centuries old, albeit still small in size.) Many residents of the Succulent Karoo who had lost their jobs as businesses shut down because of the pandemic now turned to illegally collecting plants, then selling them to the agents of transnational criminal organizations, according to Annette Hübschle, chief research officer of the Global Risk Governance program at the University of Cape Town law faculty.

Hübschle said that the Northern Cape province, from which most interdicted succulents were taken, “is a bit like frontier country.” The area already had criminal networks to move diamonds and other illicit commodities, and they easily accommodated succulent plants.

The vast size of the Succulent Karoo and the small number of law enforcement officers who patrolled it made poaching very difficult to control. Enforcement is also complicated because South African conservation laws do not always align from province to province and between the provincial and national levels, said Carina Bruwer, an organized crime researcher with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies. Possession of a particular species may be illegal in one province but not another, or it might be illegal to collect but legal to possess.

Nonetheless, some enforcement teams had success, most prominently the local Stock Theft and Endangered Species Unit of the South African Police Service in the small town of Springbok, in the heart of the Northern Cape. That unit seized huge numbers of plants in roadblocks and via targeted raids and sting operations, and it arrested hundreds of poachers, most of them small operators.

Confiscated succulents poured into South African botanic gardens, sometimes tens of thousands of plants per week. They had to be kept alive as evidence in criminal cases, and they needed expert care because many were in poor condition or required particular soil and climate requirements. Garden staff told Yale Environment 360 that they soon became overwhelmed — they often did not have the funds for enough pots and soil, enough space, or enough time to nurture the plants. By May of 2024, more than 1.16 million plants from more than 650 species had been seized, over 80 percent of which were conophytums. (The majority have since died, although some facilities have had good success in keeping plants alive.)

Most seized succulents can’t easily be replanted in the wild: Their places of origin are unknown; they might transfer diseases from greenhouses to the wild; and their physiologies have become accustomed to the “soft” greenhouse environment, so they’ll die if returned to the desert. And, of course, they would still be vulnerable to poaching.

“There have been two attempts at relocating populations of poached succulents back to their natural habitats,” a succulent expert who helped with the relocations but is not authorized to speak to the media told Yale Environment 360. “The plants actually survived fairly well, but both populations have been hit by poachers again.”

It’s impossible to estimate accurately how many plants have been trafficked from South Africa since 2019; the number can’t be easily extrapolated from seizure statistics. But thousands of plant populations have been impacted, with as-yet unknown effects on ecosystems. Because of poaching, at least eight species of Conophytum are now considered “functionally extinct,” which means that a tiny number may still survive in the wild, but there are too few to sustain the species’ population or fulfill their previous role in their ecosystem. All Conophytum species have been reclassified in higher IUCN Red List threat categories since 2019.

Despite extraordinary efforts by conservationists, academics, and law enforcement officers to protect succulents, there are no ready solutions to South Africa’s plant poaching problem. One reason, experts say, is that markets for particular plants can shift rapidly and are often poorly understood. Protection policies are often formulated on the basis of unsupported assumptions or too little data and implemented too late, after consumer demand and poaching has risen to harmful levels. Legal growers often can’t react to increased market demand in time, particularly for slow-growing species.

Recently, South Africa appears to have experienced a change in demand for some poached plant species, though evidence is incomplete, and the reasons for the apparent change aren’t completely clear yet. During 2023, there was a reduction in local seizures of poached Conophytum plants, and during 2024, Conophytum seizures almost ceased. A succulent expert who monitors Asian online markets says that prices for some Conophytum species have collapsed. Some observers think the Conophytum craze has passed: Chinese growers now appear to be producing large numbers, possibly replacing wild-sourced plants in that market.

Does this mean that South Africa’s plant poaching crisis is over? Probably not, say experts.

Karel Du Toit, the police officer who led the highly successful Stock Theft and Endangered Species Unit in Springbok, was arrested by South Africa’s national Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation in May of 2024 on what some conservationists and researchers say are trumped-up charges of fraud. He was suspended and then fired, and now his former unit has turned its focus away from plants, so the lack of Conophytum seizures may indicate a lack of law enforcement rather than the absence of trafficking.

Carl Brown, a biodiversity law enforcement officer in the Western Cape Province, says that as Conophytum seizures by his unit have declined in the last year, seizures of rare bulb plants, especially a species named Clivia mirabilis, have skyrocketed. (Other sources say that Clivia mirabilis has recently been almost completely wiped out of its small natural habitat by poachers.)

In addition to its eye-popping range of succulent types, South Africa also has the world’s largest diversity of geophytes, plants with underground nutrient storage organs like bulbs or rhizomes. Over 2,000 geophyte species grow in the Succulent Karoo and the adjacent Fynbos biome, and many are rare, have beautiful flowers, and — just like conophytums — take many years to mature. It’s possible, says Brown, that plant poachers are responding to changing buyer tastes and shifting their attention to different targets. Given South Africa’s extraordinary botanical richness, they have many options for years to come.