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Coco de Mer
© Didier Descouens
This flowering palm is a plant kingdom record-holder: It boasts the largest fruit ever recorded (95 pounds), the worldâs heaviest seeds (up to 40 pounds), and the largest flowers of any female palm. Reaching heights of 110 feet and topped by leaf fronds more than 30 feet long, everything the Coco de Mer does is big â big, and incredibly slow.
Native to the Seychelles Islands, the Coco de Mer takes 25 to 50 years just to reach maturity. Once mature, the palms begin to flower, creating seeds that take two years to germinate and fruit that then takes six to ten years to ripen. But thereâs an upside to Coco de Merâs slow-going ways: longevity.
âEverything about this palm is prolonged,â says Frank Almeda, senior curator of the Academyâs Botany department, âincluding its lifespan.â Left undisturbed by humans, fire, or pathogens, a Coco de Mer palm can continue to produce flowers and fruits for up to 800 years.
Conservation status
Once found throughout the Seychelles, the Coco de Mer is now endangered. Biologists count six remaining palm stands on the Praslin and Curieuse Islands, protected bio-reserves managed by the Marine Parks Authority of the Republic of the Seychelles. Efforts to cultivate the palm are underway, but as Almeda reports, âItâs a slow process, and not always successful under greenhouse conditions.â
Whatâs in a name
Before the island home of the Lodoicea maldivica was discovered in 1768, sailorsâwho often spotted the palmsâ giant bivalve husks floating as far east as the Maldivesâspoke of a legendary tree that grew at the bottom of the ocean, referring to it in French as coco de merâânut of the Sea.â
At the Academy
There are two Coco de Mer specimens at the Academy, gifts from a former research associate who bought them as souvenirs in the Seychelles before conservation laws restricted their export. Unlike most of the Academyâs specimens, however, these donât qualify as research specimens. âWeâd need to know the time and place each was collected,â Almeda explains, âand [weâd need] examples of the male and female stalks where the fruit was born. Without these, we can only use the specimen as a teaching device.â
Did you know
The Coco de Mer is an actual giant; among Seychelles flowering plants, itâs been identified as the âonly true case of island gigantismââan example of the biological phenomenon that often sees species confined to islands vastly out-bulk their mainland counterparts.
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