Word: wiedhopf
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...thievery is fueled in part by the conservation effort itself. "International rules aimed at preventing the movement of plants and seeds in order to protect them have had unintended consequences," says Dick Wiedhopf, president of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America and its Tucson chapter. "They have made [cactuses] more valuable." That explains why wildlife - including cactus - ranks just below drugs and guns as the most popular good smuggled out of Mexico, according to experts...
...trawl of the enthusiasts' presence on the Internet - some of the plants' biggest fans are in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic and Japan - yields hundreds of sites offering information about cactuses as well as nurseries where collectors can buy. "There are more sites, more information than we have ever had," Wiedhopf says. "It's marvelous. That's the upside." The problem is that some collectors don't want to buy from nurseries. Rather than purchasing from, say, the acres and acres of cacti nurseries in the Netherlands, avid collectors travel to Mexico instead, according to Dr. Martin Terry, a biologist...
...Arizona's signature cactus, the saguaro, whose beautiful white blossoms are the state flower. While the saguaro is not among Arizona's seven endangered cactus species, the shallow-rooted plant is often preyed upon by poachers, who can earn up to $60 a foot for a wild specimen, Wiedhopf says. The desert symbol grows slowly, about an inch a year - it can take six or seven decades for the saguaro cactus to grow an arm - and those 15-to-20-foot saguaros that dot the Sonoran desert can be over 200 years old. According to state law, any saguaro cactus...
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