Kemaman Fan Palm

The Essence

"Licuala kemamanensis is a small, stemless fan palm recorded only from Terengganu, on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. C.X. Furtado described it in 1940 from material Corner collected at Sungai Nipa in the Kemaman district, publishing it as one of nine new Licuala species in his account of the genus in the Malay Peninsula. In that paper Furtado counted twenty-five Licuala species indigenous to the Peninsula and observed that nineteen of them were endemic, most apparently restricted to small regions - though he cautioned that much of this endemism might be more apparent than real, since Licuala are hard to tell apart in the field and were poorly represented in collections. The species remains very poorly collected: GBIF lists just three herbarium specimens worldwide, two of them from Terengganu and a third labelled only "Malay Peninsula". The most informative, gathered in 1999 in Bukit Banki Forest Reserve, is labelled regenerated lowland dipterocarp forest at 180 m. Furtado's protologue describes only flowers, still in bud, and no fruit. He considered the species very close to the Sumatran L. ferruginoides, differing in its acaulescent habit, smaller fronds, non-flexuous inflorescences and smaller flowers. Horticultural sources add that it is a clustering palm with a glossy green, circular leaf of numerous narrow segments, though the protologue mentions no clustering habit and calls the plant simply low and stemless. No ethnobotanical or economic uses were found in any source consulted."

The species was published by C.X. Furtado in 1940 in "Palmae Malesicae VIII - The Genus Licuala in the Malay Peninsula" (Gardens' Bulletin, Straits Settlements 11: 31-73), the protologue cited by IPNI, POWO, GBIF and World Flora Online at page 50 and illustrated as Fig. 3. Among the peninsular species, Furtado noted that only L. kunstleri shares similarly simple partial inflorescences, that species being readily separated by the very long pedicels of its flowers, its turbinate calyx and its glabrous ovary. L.G. Saw's later revision of Licuala in the Malay Peninsula recognised 41 species there, 15 of them newly described, along with three new varieties.