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North Carolina's Venus Fly Trap Black Market Is Booming

You think of drugs and gun black markets ... but plants?
Poachers use machettes or crow bars to dig the Fly Traps out of the ground. Often stuffing thousands into a back pack and running off without getting caught.

WILMINGTON, N.C. - At Wilmington's Stanley Rehder Carnivorous Plant Garden, something's eating at the founder's daughter.

"It's like they are going in and raping this land and taking what's not theirs. And really stealing from future generations," Julie Rehder said.

Thieves stole all the Venus Fly Traps. And a few miles away NC Wildlife Resources Commission officer Brandon Dean says on another piece of land someone also poached almost all the Fly Traps there too.

"There is a huge market for these Venus Fly Traps," Dean said. "It's bigger than me and you realize. A lot bigger."

Dean's caught poachers using machetes to dig up the plants by their roots often taking more than one thousand Venus Fly Traps at a time. Each plant sells for up to a quarter a piece on the black market. So that's about $300 the poachers make with a couple hours of work.And Dean says the guys buying the poachers product, then turn around and sell the plants for about $7 a piece online. Or grind them up to make pricey supplements to sell around the world.

Fighting off poachers isn't easy.

"You can't see them from the road," Dean said. "They are so far off the road that the majority of times when we catch them, it's either by another fly trapper ratting on them or just by sheer luck."

 

But the state is clamping down by making poaching fly traps a felony last year. The possible penalty went from a maximum of 20 days to 25 months. And the first guys arrested under the new law each faced a million dollars bond.

"The felony I hope is going to deter a lot of people from doing this," Dean said.

 

Back at the garden they hope to take a bite out of the poachers by putting up some new cameras as the Coastal Land Trust helps replenish the Venus Fly Traps.

"There would be a huge loss in the universe if this one special little plant were gone. Because it does show us the power of evolution, it shows us the power of adaptability of our natural world, and it shows us how special things can be in God's creation," Camilla Herlevich said.

Researchers' best estimates say there's only about 35,000 left in the wild. But remember poachers pulled up almost one thousands of them in those back packs alone.

So how is it even legal to sell these plants? We're still at that threshold where right now you can sell the traps. But only if you raise the plants in a green house or you have the land owners permission to dig them up. The trouble is - there's no way to tell if the plant was taken legally or by poachers.

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