Word: cactuses
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...hardy cactus may be doomed by rustlers and smugglers...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...