Satranabe palm

The Essence

"Satranala decussilvae is the only species in its genus. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew botanists found it in Madagascar in 1991, and it proved distinctive enough to warrant an entirely new genus, published by Dransfield and Beentje in Kew Bulletin in 1995. The describing authors called it one of the most exciting discoveries made during their project: the first fan palm from the rain forests of the East Coast, "looking quite like a Bismarckia, but with totally different fruit". Molecular analyses give moderate to high support for Satranala being sister to Bismarckia. The diagnostic feature sits inside the purple-black fruit: a woody, nearly globose endocarp bearing conspicuous, mostly vertical flanges 3-6 mm high radiating from the base, one of them forming a crest along an entire vertical circumference and so dividing the endocarp into two faces. Dransfield and Beentje suggested the endocarp may be adapted to being swallowed by large birds such as the now-extinct elephant bird Aepyornis - a theory they conceded cannot be tested - noting that comparably heavily sclerified and sculptured endocarps occur in Ptychococcus, Brassiophoenix and two species of Licuala in New Guinea, where they appear adapted to dispersal by cassowaries, extant relatives of the elephant bird. Trebrown notes there seems very little, if any, effective dispersal of the palm at the present day. The Betsimisaraka name for it is satranabe. The IUCN Red List assesses the species as Endangered, with a population of about 200 mature trees at five known locations that is severely fragmented, threatened by clearance for shifting agriculture and logging, by leaf harvesting for thatch and by seed harvesting and export for the international horticultural market; it is also listed on CITES Appendix II. It remains extremely rare in cultivation, with scattered plants photographed at Nong Nooch in Thailand, Hilo in Hawaii, Leu Gardens in Orlando and Miami in Florida, and Babinda in Queensland."

A genuinely modern discovery: Kew botanists collected the palm in 1991, and it was described in Kew Bulletin 50(1): 85-92 in 1995. At the single site then known, the describing authors reported seeing 30 trunked trees, 40 young ones and many seedlings. The species was already assessed as Endangered in 1998; the current Red List assessment, by Rakotoarinivo and Dransfield, was made in December 2010 and published in 2012, and keeps it Endangered.