The Lonely Cycad

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Plants, too, experience unrequited love.

A tree in South Africa, the Wood’s cycad, has only had male specimens for at least 130 years. So far, the species has been preserved thanks to cloning.

Now, a group of scientists have embarked on a search for a female specimen to allow Wood’s cycads to reproduce naturally. And because the job comes down to finding a needle in a haystack, they have sought help from artificial intelligence (AI).

Cycads are sometimes dubbed “living fossils,” because they emerged 300 million years ago, therefore predating and outliving dinosaurs, wrote project leader and biologist Laura Cinti in the Conversation. But more famously, they’re called “the most solitary organism in the world” by paleontologist Richard Fortney.

“I was very inspired by the story of the (Wood’s cycad), it mirrors a classic tale of unrequited love,” said Cinti.

Though they look like palm trees, cycads are not related to that species. This makes finding specimens in the wild a very arduous task – the only known wild cycad was found in 1895 in South Africa’s Ngoye Forest before it was uprooted and propagated in the early 20th century.

That initiative ensured the survival of the species – it was among the most endangered on Earth. Nonetheless, “they remain in this permanent vegetative state. A male without a female, this is a potent story,” Cinti told the London Times.

To find a female, Cinti and her team used thousands of aerial photographs of the Ngoye Forest taken in 2022 and 2024 and trained AI to tell apart cycads and palm trees.

Having only covered a meager percentage of the 10,000-acre forest, Cinti’s team has not yet found a perfect candidate. But hope remains.

When the day comes, “as a final step, ground truth verification is always necessary to confirm the findings,” Cinti told LiveScience.

The female tree will most likely be uprooted as well to ensure reproduction in controlled habitats, with the end goal being the reintroduction of Wood’s cycads into the wild.