I did some mass helioptris mining on beta today.  I confirm that there are certainly plants with more than 100 in the beta islands, though there were probably about 3-5 out of the nearly 50 i farmed.  Beyond that I completely wiped out every node i harvested and i wasn't really looking to gather any data on it.  However you've piqued my interest and though I've been mostly mining I think i'm going to switch to being Harvester focused.

I look forward to seeing more of your data and I'm willing to go back to that spawn tomorrow and see if there is anything i can learn from it.  This spawn is rather close to my corps beta outpost so this data would be of great use to me.  I'd like to offer to help however i have little experience with research like this so if you want to PM about what i should look out for feel free.

P.S. I can confirm that i also saw these 0 yield "seed" spawns though i dont know how they were created and also that when spawns are completely wiped out they disapeer along with the terrain block that came with them.