National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act, 2004 (Act No. 10 of 2004)

Notices

Non-Detriment find Assessment for Aloe ferox (Bitter Aloe)

Table 1: Detailed NDF assessment for Aloe ferox undertaken in accordance with the CITES NDF checklist.

Biological Characteristics

2. Regeneration potential
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What is the regenerative potential of the species concerned?

Fast vegetatively

1

Slow vegetatively

2

Fast from seeds

3

Slow or irregular from seeds or spores

4

Uncertain

5

 

Aloe ferox flowers from May to August, but at higher altitudes, flowering may be delayed until September (Holland et ai, 1978). The plants produce a single, branched inflorescence with 5 -12 erect, dense racemes with orange-red flowers. Pollination is facilitated by birds and insects (Hoffman, 1988). Large quantities of broadly winged seeds are produced by individual plants (Holland 1978; Newton and Vaughan 1996). Aloe ferox is considered to be relatively easily propagated by seed (Holland et al., 1977; Bosch, 2006; Bairu et al., 2009) but can also reproduce vegetatively by means of cuttings, although this rarely happens in the wild and the use of cuttings for cultivation is limited by the single stem characteristic of these plants (DAFF 2015). In the wild, seeds of A. ferox typically germinate within three weeks of release, with their viability considerably reduced within a year after dispersal (Cousins and Witkowski, 2012).