Four Czech men were arrested at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paolo, Brazil in February this year on charges of smuggling native species.

Brazil is a well-known centre of the illegal bird and pet trade, but allegations of an attempted theft of more than 100 cactus plants and some 2,000 seeds were perhaps more surprising.

The allegedly poached cacti came from Brazil’s most southern state, Rio Grande do Sul. It’s an area of globally renowned cactus biodiversity with many species that exist nowhere else, often in tiny, isolated populations vulnerable to over-collection.

The four men, including the former president of the Czech and Slovak Cactus Society, were recently released on bail and returned to Czechia after several months in detention in Brazil. Supporters from the Czech cactus community maintain the group are legitimate researchers who collected the specimens for non-commercial purposes.

Framing what happened as a one-off cactus caper would be incorrect. Czech collectors are well-known in the world of cacti and succulents (the wider family of drought-resistant plants) as exceptional growers. They also have a less-than impeccable reputation for illicit trading, although there is no suggestion that this was the case for the four arrested men.

I began researching this trade in 2017 for my book, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade. Of the many stories I encountered, none was more surprising than the history of Czech collectors.

The original cactus hunter

At the turn of the 20th century, cacti were already popular ornamental plants across Europe, where they were prized among the bourgeois set. One rising star in this succulent scene was a young man named Vojtěch Frič (he would later adopt the name Alberto Vojtěch Frič........

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