Work-in-Progress
Creating a Female
The search is ongoing. But what happens if the female is not there?
Becoming Female shifts the investigation from searching for a missing female to exploring whether one might be created. The project investigates alternative conservation strategies for inducing sex change in the existing male plants through chemical and environmental interventions.
E. WOODII &
The Missing Female
More than a century ago, Encephalartos woodii (E. woodii) was identified in the oNgoye Forest of South Africa. Despite multiple expeditions, no other specimens have been found.
Existing specimens of E. woodii, whether in botanical gardens or private collections around the world, are propagated from offsets of a single pollen-producing individual that was removed from the forest in the early twentieth century. The resulting clonal lineage has prevented the species from disappearing entirely.
From a biological standpoint, cycads are unequivocally dioecious: their reproduction depends on a structural separation of pollen- and seed-bearing organs across distinct individuals.
Lacking a female counterpart, E. woodii is confined to clonal repetition, no possibility exists for genetic renewal, only endless offsets of the same pollen-producing lineage.
SPONTANEOUS SEX REVERSAL
In cycads
HYBRIDISATION
Backcrossing with close relatives
Two broad approaches have been proposed for addressing the absence of a female E. woodii: hybridisation and sex change.
Hybridisation involves crossing E. woodii pollen with female reproductive structures from a closely related species, such as Encephalartos natalensis. The resulting offspring could potentially be backcrossed repeatedly with E. woodii over successive generations, with the aim of producing plants that increasingly resemble the original species.
However, each generation would inherit genetic material from a maternal lineage belonging to another species. This raises questions about genetic identity, species boundaries and what it means to restore a species whose original genetic lineage is represented by a single surviving male clone.
Hybridisation may offer a route towards a plant resembling E. woodii, but whether this would constitute the restoration of the original species remains an open question.
INDUCING SEX CHANGE
In tissue-cultured plantlets
E. woodii is difficult to propagate through tissue culture, and even successful sexual reproduction would involve lengthy processes of germination and development.
IMAGINING THE FEMALE
Speculative Cone
To date, no female cones of E. woodii have been observed. Drawing on related species and botanical inference, these speculative renderings imagine what a female reproductive structure might look like in a cycad that is extinct in the wild.
The female cone is both a botanical hypothesis and an image of an absence. It gives form to something that has never been observed in this species, occupying the space between scientific inference and artistic imagination.
Creating a female raises a further question: can a species be conserved by changing it? And if the creation of a female were possible, would it restore what has been lost, or produce something new?
