Emily Chan
Artificial intelligence is being used to help find a female mate for an endangered male plant that has been referred to as the loneliest plant in the world. The University of Southampton in England is leading the project.
The Wood’s cycad (Encephalartos woodii) is a rare and ancient plant that predates the dinosaurs. All the Wood’s cycad plants in existence are male clones.
But, in order to keep the threatened species from becoming extinct, it needs a female specimen to reproduce naturally. Scientists believe that Wood’s cycad is one of the most endangered organisms on the planet.
Now, researchers are combing through thousands of acres of forest in South Africa to locate a female Wood’s cycad. Of course, this is a near-impossible task. So, researchers are enlisting the help of drones and AI.
They are using an image-recognition tool to analyze thousands of photos captured by drones in the Ngoye Forest in 2022 and 2024. So far, less than two percent of the 10,000-acre area has been covered. The tool was trained to single out Wood’s cycads from other plants.
“I was very inspired by the story of the E. woodii; it mirrors a classic tale of unrequited love,” Lauren Cinti, the project leader and research fellow at the University of Southampton, said, “I’m hopeful there is a female out there somewhere; after all, there must have been at one time. It would be amazing to bring this plant so close to extinction back through natural reproduction.”
The only Wood’s cycad we know of today was found by South African botanist John Medley Wood in the Ngoye Forest in 1895, so that’s where the search is being conducted. The plant was named after him. Wood looked for other examples of the plant, but he never encountered any others.
Botanists created a population of male Wood’s cycads by removing stems and offshoots from the lone plant in the forest. Then, they propagated them in botanical gardens. One specimen was transported to the Royal Botanic Gardens in London in 1899. Since then, it has lived there alone for 125 years.
In 1916, officials brought the lone wild Wood’s cycad plant to an enclosure in Pretoria, South Africa. Unfortunately, it died a few years later. The Wood’s cycad is extinct in the wild. Its clones are kept well-protected from poachers.
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