Stalking the Wild Lophophora PART 3 San Luis Potosí (Central), Querétaro, and Mexico City

MARTIN TERRY Stalking the wild Lophophora PART 3 San Luis Potosí (central), Querétaro, and Mexico City e continued south on High- ticular—before retreating into the brush. It was way 101, leaving Tamau- not an appealing environment to spend time in, lipas and entering San and as soon as we had collected our samples and Luis Potosí just before we taken our photos, we left, heading further east- hit Highway 80, on which ward on Highway 80. we turned east toward El We stopped after a short distance to check Huizache. The latter is a a friend’s GPS record of what was reported village at the intersection to be “L. williamsii.” And we did indeed find of Highways 57 and 80. It is also the landmark Lophophora there, on both sides of the highway, Wfor the population that Ted Anderson selected as but it was L. koehresii, not L. williamsii. This the source of his neotype specimen to represent was another mud-flat population, and while the the species Lophophora williamsii. I had visited plants were not exactly abundant, we were able this population in 2001, and it was immediate- to find enough to meet our quota of tissue sam- ly apparent, now six years later, that the popula- ples without difficulty. Here again, there was no tion had undergone some changes for the worse. evidence that the L. koehresii had been harvest- There was evidence that plants were being dug ed, despite the fact that it was a heavily traf- up entire (including the roots, as opposed to the ficked area with much human activity. sustainable practice of removing the “button,” Robert noticed that just a short hike up from or aboveground portion of the stem, and leav- the highway was a limestone ridge that looked ing the large subterranean portion of the stem like typical habitat for L. williamsii, so we decid- to resprout (see sidebar Where’s the goods) and ed to check it out. Bingo! On the lower slopes, in the average size and density of the plants had alluvial limestone soil, we found just a couple of visibly decreased compared to what I had seen specimens of L. williamsii, but a few meters far- six years before, with the clumps of caespito- ther up in a limestone outcrop we found classic se plants being similarly reduced in size. There L. williamsii habitat and what had been a fair- was also new agricultural activity in the middle ly dense population of the species. Unfortunate- of the Lophophora habitat, where fields plowed ly we arrived a few weeks too late to see the pop- for marginal agriculture had replaced Chihua- ulation in its full glory. The landscape had been huan Desert. An undernourished burro brayed at devastated. Massive quantites of whole plants us—or perhaps it just brayed, at no one in par- had been dug up and removed. Seedlings and 310 CACTUS AND SUCCULENT JOURNAL + * Near El Huizache, San Luis Potosí, L. williamsii may be solitary or caespitose. This is the neotype locality for L. williamsii. Its fame and easy accessibility, at the junction of two major federal highways, render it an obvious target for commercial cactus harvesters, and we found a number of their familiar excavations where entire plants had been dug up and removed. The plants here are expected to be genetically different from the L. williamsii that occur in the US, because the Texas plants are apparently 100% self-fertile, whereas the plants from El Huizache are reported to be obligate outcrossers (that is, a given plant can set viable seed only if it is fertilized by another plant). That means the Texas plants are highly inbred with minimal genetic diversity, while the El Huizache plants are expected to show far more genetic diversity within a given population. We do not know the nature of the market the destroyers were supplying with these plants. We do know, however, that it was a mescaline market. small juveniles had been dug up, discarded, and left to die. The poachers had been careless and WHERE’S THE GOODS? dropped a few of the uprooted adult plants along The concentration of mescaline (the hallucino- the trail on the way out. We replanted as many genic chemical) in peyote varies among popula- of the uprooted plants as we could find and col- tions. It also varies with time of year, plant age, lected the tissue samples we needed, but this and tissues sampled. Some investigators have scene of destruction was sickening, and we left found considerably less mescaline in the roots without delay. We do not know the nature of of plants from some populations, for example, the market the destroyers were supplying with but others have found mescaline concentrations these plants. We do know, however, that it was in the root and stem to be similar. I suspect that a mescaline market. We know this because the this disparity is attributable not so much to poachers walked right through the population of variation in the methods of analytical chemistry, L. koehresii—without touching them—on their but rather to widespread misunderstanding of way to the ridge where they found and thorough- how much of the subterranean portion of the ly pillaged the population of L. williamsii. They plant is actually stem, how little is actually root, knew exactly what they were looking for, and it and where the thin transition region between was not pellotine (see sidebar A cactus at the these tissues is. Specific tissue concentrations pharmacy). of alkaloids constitute another one of those The positive aspect of the situation was the questions that needs careful and comprehen- clear finding of two populations, one of L. koeh- sive evaluation, taking into account geography resii and one of L. williamsii, separated by no and time of year, as well as tissue type. And the more than 500 meters, but completely distin- answer to this question is not merely academic, guishable morphologically, ecologically, and phy- as harvesting the tuberous subterranean portion tochemically (the difference in alkaloid profiles of the plants hampers new vegetative growth 6 is reported in the analytical work of Štarha and and therefore jeopardizes the population. confirmed commercially by the poachers’ accu- 2008 VOLUME 80 NUMBER 6 311 rate, selective behavior in the field). I predict that our DNA data will show an equally clear distinction between these two seemingly sympatric, but in fact ecologically allopatric, species. We spent the night in Ciudad del Maíz, where cooked food, a shower, and bed were welcome amenities. Next morn- ing, refreshed, we hit the highway heading south on a good gravel road, stop- ping to sample more L. koehresii populations near Las Tablas and San Francisco. The Las Tablas population is one that has been known for many years—but not as a population of L. koehresii. Ted Ander- son included Las Tablas among the populations he sampled for his PhD thesis, but he did not recognize that the specimens there were anything other than an unusual form of L. williamsii7. And I con- fess that when I first saw these plants in 2001, my reaction was similar: They’re just L. williamsii plants with a different flower color, living in lowland alluvial soil instead of upland calcareous soil. But these are not taxonomically significant differences in such a highly polymorphic species as L. williamsii...or so I thought. Once one’s eye has learned to recognize * L. koehresii east of El Huizache, growing mostly in mud near the highway. The large specimen was found growing beneath a large Opuntia leptocaulis. - Scene of destruction east of El Huizache. L. williamsii was uprooted en masse by commercial cactus harvesters, who dropped these plants on the trail between the highway and the peyote population. Interestingly, they walked right through a population of L. koehresii, confirming that species as a non-drug plant. Please note: peyote can be sustainably harvested. It is not necessary to remove the root of the plant to harvest the “button.” If left behind, the subterranean portion of the stem will often sprout new stems that eventually grow to become harvestable crowns.2 312 A CACTUS AT THE PHARMACY Pellotine, which was marketed as a sedative/ hypnotic about a century ago by Boehringer & Sohn in Germany, was obtained by isolating the alkaloid from an extract of Lophophora diffusa (at that time confusingly known as Anhalonium williamsii. What we now know as L. williamsii was then known as Anhalonium lewinii). When the Bayer company discovered how to synthesize barbiturates (starting in 1911), the drugs proved so cheap to manufacture—and so effective—that the extraction of pellotine from a field-collected Mexican cactus of unpredictable availability was no longer commercially competitive, so pellotine disappeared from the pharmaceutical market. Eventually Späth4 synthesized pellotine, and Brossi and others5 later discovered an improved procedure for synthesizing it, but the drug was never brought back into commercial use. It is interesting that pellotine is the second most abundant alkaloid (after mescaline) in L. williamsii, but it is by far the most abundant alkaloid in the other species of Lophophora (accounting for 70–90% of total alkaloid content), and in those species mescaline is present in only trace concentrations—not high enough to have pharmaco- logical effects from ingestion of the cactus. the differences between L. koehresii and L. williamsii, the two taxa remain indelibly demarcat- ed and impossible to put back into the same con- ceptual taxonomic container (see sidebar It’s in the ribs). Particularly conspicuous is the diffu- * Lophophora koehresii near Las Tablas, San Luis sa-like rib morphology of L.

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