Environment

This Tree Will Self-Destruct: Giant Palm found on Madagascar

by Jordan Yerman | January 17, 2008 at 06:23 am

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A giant palm that flowers once every 100 years has been discovered in Madagascar. This specimen is very rare: few are said to survive, and nobody knows for how long: these trees die after they flower.

Details of the flowers and branches suggested it was a species and genus of palm that had never been described before. Genetic tests on the plant confirmed that it comes from an evolutionary line that was not previously known to exist in Madagascar.

The plant is unusual for its spectacular life cycle. Once it is fully grown, the tip of the stem branches into hundreds of tiny flowers that sap nutrients from the plant so rapidly that it collapses and dies.

Botanists on Thursday announced they had identified a new species of palm that is so enormous it can be spotted from space and whose bizarre life cycle requires the plant to kill itself after it has flowered.

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The gigantic, pyramid-shaped plant was discovered accidentally by a French family walking in remote northwestern Madagascar, according to the publishers of their study.

The palm's trunk is over 18 metres (58.5 feet) high and its leaves are an extraordinary five metres (16.25 feet) in diameter, which could make them the largest ever known among flowering plants.

It can be mistaken for other types of palm when it does not flower, according to Mijoro Rakotoarinivo, a botanist working for the London botanical gardens in Madagascar.

But when it flowers, it makes a large shoot on the top and spreads like an asparagus, and the branches of its shoot grow covered with tiny white flowers that ooze with nectar.