Prickly but Imperiled Species

By Michael Demarest. Reported by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Lajitas

The hardy cactus may be doomed by rustlers and smugglers

In March, when the wild cactus bursts into flower throughout the Southwest, Joe Abrigo's business also blossoms. Owner of an adobe trading post and bar near the ghost town of Terlingua, Texas, Abrigo, a 43-year-old Anthony Quinn lookalike, is one of a network of entrepreneurs along the Mexican border who are engaged in the lucrative if often shadowy business of buying and selling cactus plants wholesale. In summer, when demand hits its peak, a cactus trader may ship thousands of the plants in a week. They wind up in plastic pots at supermarkets or in the homes and gardens of the well-to-do, from Nagasaki to New York to Nuremberg. The trouble is that many of the plants are taken and transported illegally. Says California Botanist Lyman Benson, a leading authority on cacti of the Southwest: "The cactus family may be the most endangered species of all major groups of plants." Cactologists list 90 native kinds as endangered or threatened. Even the commonest specimens, like the rainbow, rattail and small-barrel cacti, are swiftly disappearing from some areas.

Many of the plants that reach markets in the U.S., Europe and Japan are smuggled across the Rio Grande River from Mexico, where peasants have stripped vast areas of Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi states almost bare of fragile and beautiful species. As a result, nearly 30 kinds are considered virtually extinct in Mexico, and 250 more are imperiled. Some choice species that sell for a few dollars each south of the border may fetch $50 or $60 at a Los Angeles nursery. Texas has no state law prohibiting the harvesting of cacti. While national preserves like the huge (1,100 sq. mi.) Big Bend National Park are protected by federal law, they are nonetheless havens for botanical bootleggers. "We don't know the numbers of cacti that are coming out of the state," sighs Dennie Miller, executive director of the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute. "It could be a million a month."

Even in Arizona, which has the nation's toughest plant-protection law and pistol-packing lawmen to back it up, cactus rustlers make away with an estimated $500,000 to $1 million worth of plants each year. Among them: the giant saguaro (pronounced sah-vrar-o), Arizona's state flower, which grows to 50 ft. or more. The fruit of the saguaro is an important food source for practically all desert birds and is used as well by humans to make preserves and, yes, cactus wine.

The California desert adjoining Arizona has been picked almost clean of saguaro, red-barrel cacti and other species. It takes a cactus-naper 15 min. to uproot a plant that may have taken more than a century to develop. And the frail root systems of most big cacti seldom survive the shock of transplanting. Plant experts in Arizona estimate that their cactus population, a major part of the flora, will virtually have disappeared in three or four decades. Though scientists do not entirely understand the full role of Cactaceae in the delicate ecology of the desert, they do know that the plants are vital to the survival of many animals.

The 2,000 species of cactus,* all of which are natives of the Western Hemisphere, have been coveted by European collectors since 1777, when a Spanish botanical expedition brought back specimens from Peru. The Germans, Japanese and Americans are considered the most avid--and ruthless--collectors. In March 1979, a group of West Germans returning from a "botanical study" tour of Mexico were found to have 6,000 cactus specimens--many belonging to a dozen threatened species.

The 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), ratified by the U.S. and 66 other nations (but not Mexico), has not helped much in reducing the depredations. Though the treaty's aim was to regulate the trade in rare and protected species, few signatory nations have customs officers with sufficient botanical knowledge to distinguish saguaro from sassafras. One solution would be stronger enforcement of existing laws that prohibit removal, transportation and sale of imperiled plants. But conservationists face a prickly task in persuading lawmakers to vote funds to save the cactus, which cannot compare in political sex appeal with such threatened creatures as the whooping crane and the blue whale. --By Michael Demarest. Reported by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Lajitas

*The name comes from kaktos, Greek for thistle.

With reporting by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Lajitas

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