Cohune palm

The Essence

"Attalea cohune is a massive solitary feather palm of lowland Mexico and Central America, described by Martius in 1844 and long known under the name Orbignya cohune. Estimates of its height vary by source: the IUCN assessment gives 8-20 m and identification keys "to 20 m", while Palmpedia reports up to 25 m. The smooth grey trunk is of exceptional hardness, carrying a crown of 10-20 leaves up to 10 m long and pendent fruiting panicles that are very large and heavy, often holding 800-1,000 fruits, each about 6 cm long and resembling a small coconut. Those seeds are its claim to fame: cohune oil is dominated by lauric acid (46.5%), with myristic (16.0%) and oleic (10.0%) acids, melts at 28 C, and has been used by Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures since pre-Columbian times as a lubricant, cooking oil, soap stock and lamp oil burned in earthenware or soapstone lamps. It is generally not used commercially because the nut is so difficult to break open, though special machinery was developed to crush it, and the hard seed shells have been used in preparing charcoal for gas masks. The nut also serves as a form of vegetable ivory, and the leaves, midribs and sap supply thatch, hut frameworks, suyacal rain mats made in Alta Verapaz, hats, brooms, fuel and palm wine; heart-of-palm is a delicacy, but taking it kills the tree, which cannot produce side shoots. The palm forms strikingly monodominant stands - McSweeney recorded densities reaching 21,640 conspecific stems per hectare in Belize - and it is a dominant species in the Belizean pine forests ecoregion. Why those stands form is unsettled: McSweeney argued in 1993 that they should be read as natural expressions of particularly fertile soils rather than a legacy of ancient Maya management, while Eshleman and Beach (2020) found total phosphorus, sulfur and soil organic matter were on average higher in non-cohune forests in northwestern Belize, concluding that the two forest soils differ in distinct ways that do not relate to key measures of soil fertility. Attalea is a large genus that combines several formerly separate genera, including Maximiliana, Orbignya and Scheelea, so older names still turn up in palm literature and on garden signs."

Martius published the name in 1844 in d'Orbigny's Voyage dans l'Amerique Meridionale. Maya communities in Belize, Guatemala and Honduras still make and use cohune oil, though McSweeney's 1993 survey found contemporary extractive use of thatch, oil and heart-of-palm in Belize to be negligible, and typically confined to forests already slated to be felled.