Imagine walking through a Permian forest some 300 million years ago. There are no flowers, no grasses just fern-filled understories and towering cone-bearing plants. Among them are the cycads: stout, spiny-leaved gymnosperms that have outlived dinosaurs, survived continental drift, and weathered ice ages. These so-called “living fossils” have persisted through multiple mass extinctions and formed ancient relationships with beetles, bacteria, and human beings. Despite their resilience, cycads now face some of their greatest threats from habitat loss and illegal trade to invasive species. Today, they are the most endangered plant order on Earth.
Though often treated as botanical curiosities or ornamental plants, cycads carry deep cultural meaning. In Japan’s Ryukyu Islands, they have been cultivated as food, used in rituals, and incorporated into Buddhist, Shintō, and palace gardens. Art History associate professor Michael D. Carrasco has been working with a research team to investigate cycads, showing that these prehistoric plants are more than ancient survivors; they are cultural keystone species.
Their project, which brings together collaborators from El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico, the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS), Montgomery Botanical Center, Kikaijima Municipal Archaeological Properties Center, the Japan Cycad Society, and citizen scientists on Amami Ōshima, investigates the intertwined ecological and cultural heritage of Cycas revoluta Thunb.—the only cycad species native to Japan. In 2025, the project received a grant from The Cycad Society to support documentation and preservation efforts, ethnographic research, botanical surveys, and genetic sampling in partnership with local communities.
On Amami Ōshima, cycads have long been part of agroecological systems, foodways, and sacred landscapes. Historically cultivated as a food, they were embedded in both daily subsistence and symbolic practice. Today, these landscapes and the traditions they sustain are under threat. The invasive cycad aulacaspis scale (Aulacaspis yasumatsui), along with habitat degradation and depopulation, imperils not only cycad populations but also the cultural knowledge that surrounds them.
In response, Carrasco and colleagues have partnered with local communities to track the spread of the scale insect and support conservation through a citizen science initiative. Their presentation, “Citizen Science and the Spread of Aulacaspis yasumatsui Takagi on Amami Ōshima, Japan,” delivered at the XIII Latin American Congress of Botany (Havana, 2025), highlighted these collaborative efforts. An interactive GIS StoryMap visualizes real-time data gathered by residents and researchers. The urgency is clear: in Guam, a similar outbreak devastated populations of Cycas micronesica within three years—a trajectory now visible on Amami Ōshima
Carrasco writes: “For at least the last thousand years, C. revoluta has been cultivated in temple, shrine, and palace gardens on the mainland, where it became a symbol of longevity, vitality, and the exoticism of the Ryukyu archipelago. At Kyoto’s Katsura Imperial Villa, a cycad hill is framed by the Waiting Arbor, a vantage point that stages the interplay between architecture, garden, and the symbolic complexity of the tea house. As living ornaments, they embodied both imperial power and the incorporation of the Ryukyus into the Japanese state. They also serve as political markers, signifying the reach of the Japanese state after the annexation of the Ryukyus. This dual identity as both humble famine food and elite ornamental underscores the plant’s symbolic complexity and invites reflection on the aesthetics of power, place, and memory.
Preserving cycads is thus not only an ecological imperative but also a cultural one. When a species disappears, so too may the stories, rituals, and relationships that have grown around it. The loss of C. revoluta would mean more than the extinction of a plant it would sever centuries-old ties between people and landscape, erasing practices that have shaped identity and ecological and aesthetic systems.”
Support from The Cycad Society grant is helping to confront this crisis directly, enabling urgent conservation measures and the preservation of cultural knowledge before it vanishes.
Carrasco and his collaborators have explored these themes in two recent publications: “From Cycad Hell to Sacred Landscapes” (Journal of Ethnobiology, 2023) and “Threats to Cycad Biocultural Heritage in the Amami Islands, Japan” (Plant Species Biology, 2024). Their interdisciplinary work highlights the vital role of plants not only in ecosystems but also in the cultural fabric of human life.
Here at Florida State, where Cycas revoluta lines walkways and courtyards, this research offers a reminder: the next time you pass a cycad on campus, consider the deep and far-reaching story it carries. These plants remind us that resilience depends not only on biology, but on the cultural stories and care that keep them alive.
BELOW: Carrasco with Eri Hara and her mother, Hatsumi Uchiyama, citizen scientists who collected data about the spread of scale in Amami over several years.
