The ‘World’s Loneliest Plant’ Could Soon Find a Mate With a Little Help From A.I.

The world’s loneliest plant could soon be a little less lonely—and possibly even find a mate—with the help of scientists using artificial intelligence (A.I.).

Their new effort could help identify an elusive female specimen of the Wood’s cycad (Encephalartos woodii), a rare and unusual member of a plant family that predates the dinosaurs.

The only known Wood’s cycad plants in existence are male, and these can be cloned to produce additional male specimens. But to reproduce naturally—and to keep the threatened species from going extinct—the Wood’s cycad needs separate male and female plants.

Discovering a female Wood’s cycad, however, is like finding a needle in a haystack. So, researchers are turning to A.I. for help.

They’re using an image-recognition tool to sift through thousands of images captured by drones in 2022 and 2024. The unmanned aerial vehicles flew over a 195-acre swath—about the size of 148 football fields—of the Ngoye Forest in South Africa, snapping pictures in five wavelengths as they went.

Researchers trained the tool, a computer vision model called YOLOv8, to pick out Wood’s cycads from other trees in the canopy. So far, they haven’t had any luck finding a female, but they’re planning to continue refining the image-recognition model.

“I was very inspired by the story of the E. woodii, it mirrors a classic tale of unrequited love,” says project leader Laura Cinti, an artist and biologist at the University of Southampton and the co-founder of C-LAB, a research-based art collective, in a statement. “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.”

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Romantic as it may sound, finding a Wood’s cycad in the wild will undoubtedly be challenging. That’s because only a single specimen has ever been seen in nature. In 1895, South African botanist John Medley Wood came upon a solitary male Wood’s cycad in Ngoye Forest. The plant was named in his honor.

Wood looked for other examples of the plant, but he never found any. Botanists removed offshoots and stems from the lone cycad in the forest, then propagated them back at their botanic gardens, creating a population of male plants. One specimen arrived at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London in 1899 and has lived there alone ever since—for 125 years.

The cloning efforts can “keep going, but it’s like ­Waiting for Godot,” Cinti tells the London Times’ Tom Whipple, referring to Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play. “They remain in this permanent vegetative state. A male without a female, this is a potent story.”

In 1916, government forestry officials removed the lone male Wood’s cycad from the wild and transferred it to an enclosure in Pretoria, South Africa, for safekeeping, as Cinti writes in the Conversation. But it died a few years later, per the project website.

The Wood’s cycad is considered extinct in the wild, and clones of the lonely male are often kept under lock and key to protect them from poachers. The exact number of clones is unknown, but Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, estimates around 110 exist, while the South African National Biodiversity Institute writes there could be as many as 500.

Cycads, as a group, have been around a long time. The first ones developed around 300 million years ago, roughly 70 million years before the emergence of dinosaurs. At that time, these plants were abundant and thriving. But today, they’re some of the most threatened species on Earth.

Cycads look similar to palms, thanks to their thick trunks and large, umbrella-shaped crowns of leaves. But they’re part of an entirely separate group that includes ginkgos and conifers.

All individual cycads are either male or female, but they are indistinguishable until they mature—a process that can take 10 to 20 years. They reproduce via their cones: Male cones—which are longer and narrower—produce pollen, which weevils then carry to the rounder, wider female cones that contain seeds.

Once the seeds are fertilized, they can be spread by birds, bats, insects and other seed carriers, as NPR’s Robert Krulwich reported in 2011. Paleontologists believe that hungry dinosaurs may have also helped cycads proliferate.

“The creatures might have dropped embryonic cycads in new places, complete with some fresh fertilizer to aid their growth,” as Riley Black wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2022.

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If researchers ever locate a female Wood’s cycad, they will likely remove it from the wild so they can closely monitor and manage its reproduction, per Live Science’s Richard Pallardy. But, for now, they’re still searching.

The 195 acres they’ve photographed so far represent just a fraction of the total 10,000-acre Ngoye Forest. So while the search hasn’t turned up any Wood’s cycads yet, they’re hopeful a female is still out there, just waiting to be found.

In addition, botanists are trying to keep the species alive by crossing a Wood’s cycad with a close relative, the natal giant cycad (Encephalartos natalensis), per Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. If the project is successful, it would produce a female “very closely resembling” a Wood’s cycad, per the gardens.

Another project, also led by Cinti, is exploring whether chemical or physiological manipulation could change the sex of the Wood’s cycad.

“There have been reports of sex change in other cycad species due to sudden environmental changes such as temperature, so we are hopeful we can induce sex change in the E. woodii too,” she says in the statement.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.