South Africa Found the Last Ancient Plant Left on Earth — What Happened Next Was Incredible

[00:00:00]The blade bit into the trunk of the plant, [music] and a sucker came away in the botist's hands, severed clean from the only wild specimen of its kind that would ever be found. It was an irreversible cut. That single [music] offset, sliced from a strange palmlike tree growing on a steep slope at the edge of a South African forest, would be carried [music] away, potted, shipped across an ocean, and coaxed into a new plant. And then that plant would be cut and cut again over and over across more than a century until the same individual stood in botanical gardens on nearly every continent [music] on Earth. The tree the blade had cut was already at that moment [music] the last of its species. It just did not know it yet and neither did the man cutting it.

[00:00:46]The plant was encphylaros woody a psyched and it was discovered in 1895 by a botonist named John Medley Wood on a collecting [music] expedition through the Goya forest in Zuluand in what is now South Africa. Wood saw it on that slope and called it the [music] handsomest of all its kind. A magnificent thing with a crown of glossy arching fronds radiating from a thick scaly trunk looking like a cross between a palm and a fern and a [music] pine, though it is closely related to none of them. Scychikads are their own ancient branch of the tree of life, nearer to conifers than to any palm. This one had several stems rising from its base, [music] an old and established plant that had clearly been growing on that slope, undisturbed and alone for a very long time. Wood was the director of the Natal Botanic Gardens in Durban, an experienced and careful botonist. And he knew at once he had found something extraordinary. He [music] had a stem of it brought back for his garden. He searched the surrounding forest for others. He searched and other collectors searched after him. And in all the years since, across the whole of the Noya forest, not one more wild plant was ever found. He had discovered the species and its single living representative in the same moment. And in that failure to find a second one lay a catastrophe that would not fully reveal itself for [music] decades. Because this plant carried a hidden flaw. A biological trap so complete that 130 years later, some of [music] the best minds and most advanced technology in botany would still be unable to solve it. What Wood had found alone on that hillside was [music] a bachelor with no possibility of a mate. Not a rare plant that might be bred back to health. Not a dwindling population that a captive breeding program could rescue, but a single individual with a flaw built into the very way its kind makes more of itself.

[00:02:50]A flaw that no amount of care or funding or technology could simply undo. The reason why is one of the strangest predicaments in the entire living world.

[00:03:00]But the story of how a single plant became the loneliest organism on the planet begins hundreds of millions of years before John Medley Wood was born in a world that no human eye ever saw.

[00:03:11][music] Psychads are not ordinary plants. They are living fossils in the fullest sense. A lineage that first appeared on Earth somewhere around 300 million years ago. Which means scychads were already ancient when the first dinosaurs evolved. They watched the dinosaurs rise, thrive for 150 million years and vanish. And the [music] scychads simply kept growing. They survived the mass extinction that ended the dinosaurs. They survived ice ages.

[00:03:41]Through it all, their basic design barely changed. So that the scychikad standing in a garden today is very nearly the same machine that fed grazing dinosaurs in the Jurassic. Their cones were torn apart and their seeds carried off by creatures that no longer exist.

[00:03:58]Not just birds and insects, but dinosaurs and terasaurs, whole extinct dynasties of animals that ate these plants and [music] spread them across a vanished world. The paleontologist Richard Forte, writing about the history of life on Earth, singled out this one sickhead above all others, calling it surely the most solitary organism in the world. Once [music] they were everywhere during the Jurassic and into the Cretaceous, psychicads and their relatives were among the dominant plants on the planet. So abundant across so much of the land that [music] botonists sometimes call that long stretch of deep time the age of psychicads. [music] For roughly 200 million years, if you had looked at the green of the earth, a great deal of it would have been psychicad. And then around a 100 million years ago, the flowering plants arose, faster growing and faster breeding, and out competed the psychids almost everywhere. And the great psyched empire collapsed into scattered remnants, clinging on in isolated pockets around the world. Today, they are remarkably the most threatened group of organisms on the entire planet. More endangered as a group than any order of animals, they are squeezed by habitat loss and they are relentlessly hunted because mature psychads can be [music] worth tens of thousands of dollars to collectors and a thriving black market strips them from the wild faster than they can ever regrow. A plant that survived every catastrophe the earth could throw at it for 300 million years is now being pushed toward oblivion by human hands.

[00:05:41]And of all the psychicheadeds, the rarest, [music] the most extreme case of a lineage reduced to almost nothing is the one John Medley Wood found on that hillside in 1895. To understand why that single plant was doomed to solitude, you have to understand how psychicads reproduce.

[00:06:01]Because it is nothing like the flowers most people picture. Scychikads do not have flowers at all. Instead, they produce enormous cones. And here is the crucial part. A psychicad is either male or female, never both. The botanical term is dioicious, meaning two houses. A male psychicad grows male cones packed with pollen. A female psychicad grows female cones that hold the seeds. For the species to reproduce, a male and a female must grow near each other. And an insect, usually a highly specific species of weevil that has co-evolved with the plant, must carry pollen from the male cone to the female cone. The cone even helps warming itself and releasing scent to summon the pollinator across the forest. No female, no seeds, no seeds, no next generation. It is a system that works beautifully when a population is healthy and both sexes are present, scattered through a forest, cones ripening, weevils shuttling between them. It becomes a death sentence the moment you are down to a single plant. Because a single plant can only ever be one sex, and one sex alone can no more make a seed than one hand can clap. Whichever sex that last plant happens to be, it is reproductively the end of the line. And the lone encphiltos woody that wood found in the Goya forest was male. There was no ambiguity about it and no second chance in it. Every cone it had ever produced, and every cone it ever would, was full of pollen meant for a female that, [music] as far as anyone has ever been able to determine, does not exist and may never have existed within living memory. Here was an organism whose ancestors had outlasted the dinosaurs, the asteroid, the ice ages, every mass extinction in a quarter of a billion years. brought to the brink not by any catastrophe [music] but by simple arithmetic. One plant, one sex, and no other. In the years after the discovery, botonists [music] did the only thing they could. They went back to that wild plant and [music] they took pieces of it. Because scychikads readily produce offsets, small suckers that sprout around the base of the trunk, each one can be carefully removed and rooted and grown into a fully genetically identical clone of the parent [music] plant, a natural form of copying that gardeners had long exploited. So over the following decades, stems and offshoots were carefully cut from the engoy plant and distributed to botanical gardens to preserve [music] the species. One offset arrived at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Q [music] in London in 1899 where it was planted and has been growing alone ever since for well over a century. It was moved into Q's temperate house and in 2004 it did something that stirred brief excitement. It produced a cone for the first time, proof that the cloned males were fully capable of reproduction. If only there were anything to reproduce with. The clones are so rare and so valuable that some are kept under lock and key, guarded against the poachers who prize the world's rarest psychicad above almost any other plant. But every piece they took was necessarily a clone of that one male. Each new plant was not a child of the original. It was the original, the same individual copied. If a story about a living creature older than the dinosaurs, marooned as the last of its kind, and searching for a partner that may already be gone forever, is worth your time. Take a moment to subscribe because what botonists have tried next to save it moves from the desperate to the almost unbelievable.

[00:09:55]And the wild plant itself could not be left in peace. It was too precious and too vulnerable out there on its slope.

[00:10:04]In 1916, forestry officials removed the last remaining stem of the wild encphylartos woody eyei from the nogo forest and moved it to Ptoria for safekeeping. And with that removal, the species went extinct in the wild. There was no longer a single wood scychad growing in nature anywhere on Earth, and the plant they moved to safety did not survive many years in its new home. The wild lineage was gone. What remained was a scattering of clones in gardens. All of them male. All of them genetically the same tree. A botanical museum piece that could be kept alive indefinitely and could never ever reproduce. And that genetic sameness is itself a danger because every specimen is identical. The entire species shares a single immune system, a single set of vulnerabilities.

[00:10:57]A new disease or pest that could kill one woods psychicad could in principle kill all of them everywhere at once. A species with no genetic variation has no defenses in reserve. This is the strange suspended [music] state the species has been trapped in ever since. A condition biologists describe as a kind of living death. The plant is not extinct in the way a dodo is extinct. [music] It is alive. You can walk up to one at Q or at Durban or at Kirstenbos or in a dozen other gardens [music] and touch a healthy growing organism. Some of them are magnificent. A mature woods scychikad in full health produces a cluster of six to eight enormous cones at a time, cylindrical, sometimes over a meter long, a vivid orange against the [music] dark green crown. Among the largest and most spectacular cones in the entire [music] psychic world. But those cones are a cruel display. They are the plant advertising for a mate, radiating heat and scent to attract the pollinators that would carry its genes onward, and there is no one to answer.

[00:12:06]Every one of those cones is male. The plant is broadcasting into a void. It has been doing so in one clone or another for more than a century. [music] A permanent bachelor frozen in what one researcher compared to the endless waiting of Samuel Beckett's play. A plant condemned to stand and wait for a partner that never comes. And so [music] botonists turned to a more radical idea, an attempt not to find a female, [music] but to build one. If no female encphylaros woody exists, perhaps one could be created through careful hybridization. The plan relies on the scychad's closest living relative, another South African species called encphylartos natalencis, [music] the natal giant psychicad, which does have both sexes. By taking pollen from the lone male woody eye and using it to fertilize a female nettilencis, botonists produce a hybrid, a [music] plant that is half woody eye. Then they take that hybrid and cross it back to woody pollen again and the offspring are 3/4 woody eye. Do it again and the next generation is closer still. This is called back crossing. And with each generation, the hybrids inch genetically nearer to a pure woods scad. And crucially, some of those hybrids are female. In gardens like Kirsten Bosch, the pollen from the male is carefully collected every couple of years when it cones and fed into exactly this slow, patient program. The dream is that generation by generation, [music] they can breed their way back to something almost indistinguishable from a true female woody eye and finally give the last male a [music] partner close enough to end its isolation. But back crossing is painfully slow because psychicads themselves are painfully [music] slow taking many years, sometimes decades to reach reproductive age. And even after many generations, the result would never be a genuine woody eye, only a very close approximation. And so the search for a real female, a true wild encphilartos woody eye still hiding somewhere in the forest never entirely stopped. For over a century that search was done the only way anyone knew how.

[00:14:27]On foot, botonists walking the ridges and valleys of the Forest, scanning the canopy, hoping. The forest covers some 10,000 acres of rugged, [music] dense terrain, and it had never been fully explored. It remained just possible that on some unvisited slope, a single female had been standing all along, unseen. And then in the 2020s, the hunt entered a new era because a researcher named Laura Cinti, working out of the University of Southampton, decided to bring 21st century technology to a 19th century mystery. Rather than search on foot, her team put drones into the air above the Ngoy canopy. [music] In 2022, the first drone surveys flew over the forest, capturing tens of thousands of images using multisspectral sensors that could detect things the human eye cannot. By reading light beyond the visible spectrum, the sensors could tell living vegetation from dead, pick out the subtle spectral signature of one plant species against another, and map the geology and canopy from a vantage point no ground search could ever achieve. A tree that had died and gone bare would show up in false color against the living green. And somewhere in that data, the team hoped the unmistakable crown of a sick head might resolve out of the forest. But tens of thousands of aerial images are far too many for any human to comb through by eye. So the team trained an artificial intelligence, an image recognition algorithm taught to identify the distinctive shape of a psyched crown from above. Because there were no wild woody to train it on, they generated synthetic images teaching the AI what to look for in a plant that essentially no longer exists in nature. In 2022 and again in 2024, the drones flew and the AI scanned, covering around 195 acres of the forest in fine detail, building intricate maps from the thousands of photographs. It was the most sophisticated search for a single plant ever mounted. And the result of that search is the heart of this story. And it is not what anyone hoped. Because after the drones, after the AI, after more than a century of botonists walking the forest, no female encphylaros woody has ever been found. The 2022 surveys found none. The 2024 surveys found none.

[00:16:59]The 195 acres they mapped in such exquisite detail is still only a fraction of the 10,000 acre forest. So hope is not extinguished. But the plain fact remains that as of today, not one female of this species has ever been confirmed to exist. Not in the wild, not in any garden, not anywhere on the planet in the entire 130 years since John Medley Wood first laid eyes on that solitary tree. And that leads to the final almost unbelievable frontier, the measure of how desperate the effort to save this plant has become. Unable to find a female and unable to breed a perfect one quickly enough, researchers are now investigating whether they might change the sex of the plant itself, chemically or physiologically, forcing a clone of the male to become female. It sounds like science fiction, but it is grounded in a real phenomenon. In some other psyched species, individual plants have been observed [music] to spontaneously switch sex in response to sudden environmental stress. a sharp change in temperature. If that switch could be understood and deliberately triggered in encphylaros woody eye, then the species could in the strangest possible way become its own partner, a male turned female to pollinate its own genetically identical self, the loneliest plant on Earth, finally reproducing by ceasing in part to be only one thing. Nobody has done it yet.

[00:18:32]The plant still stands in its gardens, coning into emptiness, waiting. And here is the fact that captures the true scale of that weight. The thing that makes this more than a story about one unlucky tree. Because every wood psyched in every garden in the world is a clone of that single 1895 male. They are not merely the same species. They are genetically the same individual, one organism that has been kept alive by copying for over a century [music] and that has never in all that time had a mate. An unbroken solitude stretching back to a slope in the Ngoy forest. And if you want more true stories like this one, where the rarest thing on Earth turns out to be a companion, subscribe and the next one will be waiting for Thank you.