Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small palms 3–8 m tall.

Stems: Unbranched trunk 20–45 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Spirally arranged; the spherical crown typically contains up to twenty–five ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Blades 122 cm long and 122 wide, flat, shallowly divided to about one–third into as many as sixty stiff–tipped segments. Upper surfaces glossy green. Lower surfaces of leaf blades silvery gray, appressed lepidote. Veins parallel. Petioles densely appressed lepidote on both surfaces. Up to 91 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences about equalling (or shorter than) the petiole, of 1–3 (or up to 5) panicles on each peduncle, panicles ca. 15–20 cm long, rather loosely branched; rachillae viscous (with densely covered with pinkish brown hairs and a silvery grayish white waxy substance) when fresh, shiny when dry, becoming sinuous between the distichously arranged, viscous flowers. prophyll and peduncular bracts soft and lax, densely tan, woolly. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sessile. Calyx and corolla thickly viscous, shining as if varnished before and after exposure from the sheathing primary bracts. Corolla of 3 petals, adnate basally to the staminal filament tube to about the height of the calyx, the distinct lobes valvate in bud, caducous as the flower expands, prominently pocketed and furrowed within, prominently nerved when dry. Stamens 6; filaments flattened, thickish, connate basally into a tube equaling or exceeding the calyx and surrounding the carpels, then distinct and abruptly subulate, not inflexed at apex; anthers erect in bud, dorsifixed, spreading–erect to versatile at anthesis, oblong in outline, bifid basally nearly to the point of insertion, apex emarginate, the connective narrow; anther sacs longitudinally and laterally dehiscent. Ovary superior; carpels 3, normally only 1 maturing, coherent only basally; ovules 1 per carpel, with the broad–based styles connate above into a trigonous column tapering to a shallowly trifid stigma; ovules anatropous, erect, attached at the base of the placenta.

Fruit: Fruit ellipsoid; pyriform; up to 4 cm long and ca. 2.5 cm wide. Seeds distinct from endocarp except at the hilum; shiny; endosperm homogeneous except for a shallow invagination of the seed coat below the raphe; embryo lateral near the base opposite the raphe.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Open wet forest.

Elevation Range: 500–700 m.