Forest Coconut

The Essence

"Voanioala gerardii is a solitary canopy palm endemic to north-eastern Madagascar, described by John Dransfield in 1989 and placed by him in the coconut alliance as Arecoideae: Cocoeae: Butiinae; molecular work summarised on Palmweb makes the genus sister to a clade of Neotropical Attaleinae and Cocos. It is known from very few small populations around the Bay of Antongil, sometimes only from scattered juvenile plants. The IUCN Red List assessment of Rakotoarinivo and Dransfield records only about 15 mature individuals across three known sites, with the population decreasing, and lists the species as Critically Endangered under criterion D. The Palm Specialist Group notes that three of the roughly ten mature trees known at the type locality were felled for palm heart in 2003, and that all other populations comprise fewer than ten individuals. The species carries the highest chromosome number recorded in the monocotyledons: at least 596 chromosomes were counted by Johnson and colleagues in 1989, and Palmweb's genus account gives 2n = 550-606 plus or minus 3. Its extraordinarily hard, deeply sculptured endocarp has been suggested by Dransfield and Beentje to be an adaptation to a now-extinct animal such as the elephant bird, Aepyornis; today ripe fruit accumulate in large numbers beneath the trees and seedlings are not found away from their bases, suggesting there is little if any effective dispersal at present. The palm is cut down both for its apical bud and young leaves, which are cooked as a vegetable and whose removal kills the tree because it cannot make side branches, and for seeds sold into international trade."

Dransfield published the genus and species in 1989 as Voanioala (Arecoideae: Cocoeae: Butiinae), a new palm genus from Madagascar, in Kew Bulletin 44(2): 191-198, the species name itself dated 24 August 1989. Seed collected in October 1986 germinated at Kew in February 1987, and it was from that batch of seedlings that Margaret Johnson counted the chromosomes; a later count in 1994, on plants from the same batch grown at Fairchild Tropical Garden in Florida, exceeded 600.