Brahea edulis, the Guadalupe palm, almost disappeared entirely in the early 1900s. Every tree on Isla Guadalupe, its one native home 240 km off the coast of Baja California, grew in the path of feral goats that had been left on the island since the 1800s. The goats ate every seedling as it sprouted. By the time botanists studied the population closely, the remaining trees were old adults with no young palms coming up behind them — a species surviving purely on the lifespan of individuals already decades old.
The goats were finally removed from Isla Guadalupe in the 2000s, and natural seedling growth returned within a few years. It is one of the more complete recoveries on record for a single-island endemic palm, and it explains why Brahea edulis shows up today in botanical garden collections and conservation plant sales far more often than in ordinary nurseries — growers with a collector's interest kept propagating it through the years when wild seed was scarce.
None of this overlaps with the date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, the source of the fruit sold under names like Ajwa, Safawi or Mariami. The two are different genera. Phoenix dactylifera was never at risk of extinction — it has been cultivated continuously across the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years, propagated by offshoot and, more recently, tissue culture, precisely because its fruit has commercial value. Brahea edulis produces a small, thin-fleshed fruit that was eaten historically by the island's indigenous population but was never developed into an agricultural crop.
The name "edulis" means edible, and it refers to that limited historical use, not to any resemblance to the dates sold in our dates fruit range. If a search for "Guadalupe palm" brought you here expecting information on eating dates, the variety guides under dates wholesaler Malaysia cover the cultivars actually grown for fruit.