One night in 2003, Mark Todd noticed something strange while browsing eBay. An electrician by trade, Todd spent a lot of his spare time admiring the carnivorous plants that grow around the swamps of his native North Carolina.

He was particularly fond of the Venus flytrap and, as luck would have it, some had just been listed for sale online. But there was something about the auction that seemed off: “Hobbyists usually only sell one or two plants. And this guy was selling 20.” Furthermore, the plants didn’t seem store-bought; they looked like they’d been plucked right out of the ground. “Something wasn’t right,” he explains.

While it’s perfectly legal to buy and sell flytraps grown on private property, Todd knew that picking them from what was left of the state land where they grow in the wild was strictly forbidden. He also knew that it was worryingly common. Every year, tens of thousands of the plants – which only grow in a 120-kilometre radius around Wilmington, North Carolina – go missing, and no one really knew for certain how many were left. Todd clicked through to the seller’s profile and saw hundreds of similar auctions. “I was 99 per cent sure these plants were poached,” he says. “So I contacted the police. And they set up a sting.”

The operation went off without a hitch: Todd purchased the plants, then delivered them to the authorities, who were waiting in a Wal-Mart parking lot. And then… well, that’s where the story drops off. The police never told Todd if they got their guy, though he doubts they could have done much even if they’d wanted to. At the time, the most a poacher could be fined was about $65 – a pittance compared to how much they could earn from a good day’s harvest.

Todd’s vigilantism had ended in anticlimax, but his resolve to help only grew more intense. And so for the past 13 years, as president of the North American Sarracenia Conservancy – a volunteer organisation dedicated to preserving the state’s carnivorous plants – Todd has spent his weekends and evenings trying to disrupt one of the most puzzling black markets currently plaguing the United States. And it’s led him to some very odd conclusions about what’s going on.

The great mystery of flytrap poaching is why anyone would bother doing it. A quick economic primer: as a rule, things worth poaching tend to be rare or illegal and, therefore, expensive. Flytraps are neither. Cultivated or ‘cloned’ plants, which are also bigger and more conventionally attractive than their wild counterparts, can be bought cheaply at almost every nursery around the world. So what would possess someone to sneak into a hot, bug-infested bog and load up sack after sack of subpar plants? Moreover, who would buy them?

Debbie Crane has some idea. As director of communications at the North Carolina branch of the Nature Conservancy, she spends a lot of her time trying to get inside the minds of poachers. To decipher their motivations, she says you need to understand the culture of rural North Carolina. “Some of these people, their daddy poached, and their granddaddy poached, and it probably goes back even more generations than that,” she says. Then there’s the poverty that feeds the crime. “It’s estimated they’re selling these things for maybe 25 cents on the plant. That might sound like not a lot of money to me and you, but if you’re living on subsistence, it’s a boost.”

Sergeant Brandon Dean of the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission agrees that, when it comes to flytraps, crime can pay. In his decade or so on the force, he’s charged 20 people with poaching, many of whom have been caught lugging several thousand plants at a time. “I’m not a mathematician, but even at 25 cents that adds up to a pretty good chunk of change,” he says.

“Investigators are left debating whether the plants are being sold to legitimate nurseries or whether they’re being snatched up by the alternative medicine industry.”

Catching poachers is always a challenge – and not just because they’re often armed with machetes. Most of the time, Dean explains, he has to rely on hikers or birdwatchers in the area to alert him if they see something suspicious. Other times, though, it’s the poachers themselves doing the informing. “They’ll get jealous because another flytrapper beat them to the punch, so they’ll call and turn them in. There’s nothing civil about it.”

As for where the traps end up, Dean says poachers sell them to regular nurseries where, just like in a money-laundering operation, the plants can be ‘cleaned’ before entering the legitimate market. “All the poachers have to do is tell the guy who runs the nursery that they dug these off their own property, and he can legally buy them and no law has been broken. That’s why we have to actually catch them in the act.”

So, which stores are buying them? Apparently there’s no telling how far the black market’s tentacles may have spread: Dean says even Australian outlets might be involved. Could this be true? At least one Australian flytrap wholesaler refused to comment on the origins of their plants. Which can either be taken as a sign that they’re hiding something, or that they don’t care to discuss their business particulars with the media. (All depending on how far your particular flytrap conspiracy paranoia goes.)

One person who will speak on the record is Chris Larson of Paradisia, a wholesale nursery in Melbourne that specialises in unusual plants. He says he can’t see the point of buying poached plants, even if they were cheaper than the hothouse ones. “We wouldn’t bother flying fully grown plants in from the U.S.,” he says. “It’s like corn: what we buy from the supermarkets is nothing like it used to be in the wild. We’ve bred it over the years to be bigger, better. Who’d want the wild stuff?”

Well, Todd and Crane have a theory. A few years ago they noticed an unusual spike in the quantity of plants being poached, which led them to speculate that something more organised than cheap nursery goods might be going on. “We heard rumours,” Crane says, “that the flytraps were being used for some bogus medicinal purposes, and that the wild ones were seen as being more effective than cloned plants.” Todd looked further into the lead, and says he discovered a herbal remedy company – which had “put in big orders” – claiming flytraps were a cure for cancer.

The company Todd is talking about is the New York-based Carnivora Research International, which makes capsules from juiced Venus flytraps that they claim can help with a wide variety of conditions. Carnivora is careful not to explicitly state that its products cure cancer, but its website claims the capsules “selectively respond to abnormal cells”. It also states that President Ronald Reagan used the product in 1985 – the same year he suffered from colon cancer.

For its part, Carnivora denies using plants from North Carolina. “They couldn’t possibly supply us with the amount of Venus flytraps that we would need,” the company’s owner and CEO, Richard Ostrow, told one reporter in 2014. In the same interview, Ostrow declined to reveal his plant source.

That denial hasn’t stopped the speculation that Carnivora is behind the spike in demand: one North Carolinian nursery claimed a few years ago that the company was ordering as many as four million traps a year. Meanwhile, without addressing Carnivora specifically, Sergeant Dean confirms that a recent drug raid conducted by the Brunswick County Sheriff ’s Department uncovered 10,000 flytraps in a drug house waiting to be shipped to New York.

But hard evidence, much like a cure for cancer, is hard to come by. In its absence, investigators are left debating whether the plants are being sold to legitimate nurseries, whether they’re being snatched up by the alternative medicine industry, or whether there’s a third, as-yet-unexplored scenario at play. “We’re not really sure where they’re going,” Debbie admits. “God knows we’ve tried to figure it out.”

Ultimately, working out what’s behind the poaching is less important than putting a stop to it. To this end, North Carolina recently passed a law that made poaching a felony punishable by 25 months in prison. And in July this year, the state successfully prosecuted its first case, sentencing a Brunswick County man caught with nearly a thousand plants to up to 17 months behind bars. “We’re hoping this law will deter people,” Crane says.

While Sergeant Dean is hopeful the new legislation will help save the wild plants, he’s also realistic about the limits criminalisation can have on the black market. “Unfortunately, some people just have no respect for the law or Mother Nature,” he says. “I guess I should consider that job security.” He’ll continue to keep an eye out for poachers, but as just one of two wildlife officers in the county, he’s got his work cut out for him.

That’s where – just like back in that Wal-Mart car park – people like Todd come in. He’s going to keep stalking the state’s wildlife reserves (and eBay) for anyone acting shady around what he jokingly refers to as “his” plants. With the resources of the North American Sarracenia Conservancy behind him, he’s started installing cameras in poaching hotspots, to try and catch himself a thief. (The Nature Conservancy has done the same thing – only to have their cameras stolen along with the plants.) As for what would happen if he finally caught someone in the act? “If it escalated, it escalated,” Todd says. “That’d be their choice. But they wouldn’t be walking out with the plants. I’m willing to do whatever needs to be done.”

From Smith Journal volume 20, 2016