Schattauer's loulu

The Essence

"Pritchardia schattaueri is the largest member of its genus, a solitary Hawaiian loulu reaching 30-40 m (100-130 ft) on a gray, longitudinally grooved trunk about 30 cm in diameter. It is endemic to the island of Hawaii, confined to the South Kona district, where roughly 12 mature wild individuals survive - ten of them in one small group, with one or two more over a mile away - all on private land. No successful natural recruitment has been reported. The IUCN Red List assesses the species as Critically Endangered (Gemmill 1998, criteria version 2.3, annotated as needing updating), citing 12 individuals in three subpopulations, and it has been listed as Endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act since 1996. Cattle and feral pigs graze and trample the plants, rats prey on the seed, and alien plants such as strawberry guava, kikuyu grass and Christmasberry compete for the habitat; agriculture and urban development, lava flows and climate change add further pressure, with a landscape-scale analysis by Fortini et al. (2013) scoring the palm 0.884 - extremely vulnerable - and finding no overlap between its current and future climate envelopes. The 2020 five-year review reports that genetic representation is now complete for the 12 wild individuals and that hundreds of plants have been reintroduced, so the species leans heavily on ex situ conservation for its survival."

Although Schattauer had drawn attention to the trees decades earlier, the species was not formally described until 1985, when Donald R. Hodel published it in Principes 29(1): 31, basing the description on a collection made in 1980 by the late H. E. Moore Jr. of the Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University. Hodel later devoted a book to the group, Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm (University of Hawaii Press, 2012), which reports approximately 12 wild individuals, 10 of them in one small population with two separate plants more than a mile distant. At genus level, Native Hawaiians ate the seeds, known as hawane or wahane, and used loulu leaves to thatch houses and temples.