Memé palm

The Essence

"Wettinia quinaria is a solitary canopy palm of the ever-wet forests of western Colombia and north-western Ecuador, and it is common rather than rare — described as one of the most common palm trees of the Pacific coast, and often dominant where more than 4000 mm of rain falls each year. An 8–15 m stem stands on a low, dense cone of stilt roots up to 1 m long (members of the genus are known collectively as stilt palms) and carries a crown of only four to six large pendulous leaves above a well-defined crownshaft. The species is monoecious and dicogamous, producing staminate and pistillate inflorescences on the same plant but at different moments of the reproductive cycle, and its pollination has been studied in detail: anthesis is diurnal and short, the inflorescences are thermogenic, and pollination is effected mostly by a Mystrops beetle (Nitidulidae) specific to this palm. The diurnal timing is thought to have coevolved as a response to the high, predominantly nocturnal rainfall of the Chocó. A 2025 study at Quibdó recorded about 1006 pistillate flowers per inflorescence — far more than in the two congeners studied alongside it — a staminate phase of three to four days and a pistillate phase of about 3.5 days, flowering peaks in November, December and March, fruiting peaking in March and April, and fruit development taking about 8.8 months. The palm is also heavily used by people: a 30-year reappraisal of palm use by two Chachi communities in Ecuador found that, as in 1985, the most important species harvested in 2015 were Iriartea deltoidea and Wettinia quinaria, and that knowledge about blowguns, blowgun darts and marimba keys seems to have vanished over the interval. Recorded uses across the range include leaves for thatch; split trunks for houses, walls, floors, posts and bridges; the hard outer stem for posts and blowpipes; and fruits, seeds, palm heart and the larvae collected from decomposing stems as food."

First described as Wettinella quinaria by O.F. Cook and Doyle in Contributions from the United States National Herbarium 16: 236 (1913), the species was transferred to Wettinia by Burret in Notizblatt des Botanischen Gartens und Museums zu Berlin-Dahlem 10: 942 (1930), which remains the accepted name. Wettinia utilis Little (Phytologia 19: 251, 1970) is a heterotypic synonym.