Ka Pho Si Sip

The Essence

"Licuala distans is a solitary, costapalmate fan palm native to peninsular Thailand. Barfod, Burholt and Borchsenius (2003) record it from Ranong in the north to Krabi in the south, growing in hill dipterocarp forest where it is locally very common, especially on ridges; the IUCN Red List also maps it as possibly extant in Myanmar. It is genuinely little collected: as of August 2026, GBIF held just 19 occurrence records, 16 of them from Thailand. Henry Nicholas Ridley described the species in 1920, IPNI recording the protologue locality simply as Penins. Siam. For such an obscure palm, its pollination biology is unusually well documented. Barfod and colleagues observed it at Sri Phangnga National Park, where stingless Trigona bees, along with a few Apis, arrived continuously and visited the hermaphroditic flowers in both the staminate and the pistillate phase; no flies were seen at the flowers, and the Trigona bees carried relatively high pollen loads, making them the probable pollinators. The floral anatomy fits: labyrinthine septal nectaries sit below the gynoecium and produce copious nectar, and anthesis is accompanied by a sweet, honey-like scent. The pollen-to-ovule ratio is about 210 (range 166-253), higher than in L. peltata (67) or L. spinosa (12). Flowering runs acropetally across the inflorescence but basipetally within each rachilla, over about four days. In cultivation it is rare and, in Plant Pono's words, coveted by palm collectors. RarePalmSeeds quotes Don Hodel's Palms and Cycads of Thailand calling it "one of the most elegant Thai palms" and suggesting protected places in the garden; Palmpedia's image gallery shows it in cultivation in Hawaii, Queensland, Reunion, Costa Rica and Florida. The IUCN assessed it as Least Concern on 13 July 2023 (assessment published 2025), with agriculture the one recorded threat."

Apart from Knuth's 1904 report of abundant nectar in Licuala grandis, nothing had been published on pollination anywhere in Licuala - a genus of more than 150 species - before Barfod, Burholt and Borchsenius published their study in Telopea in 2003. L. distans was one of only three species they examined, alongside L. spinosa and L. peltata. Voucher specimens from that fieldwork are deposited at AAU, BKF and K.