Buriti palm

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Buriti palm
Buriti palm (Mauritia flexuosa), habitus

Buriti palm ( Mauritia flexuosa ), habitus

Systematics
Order : Palm- like arecales
Family : Palm family (Arecaceae)
Subfamily : Calamoideae
Tribe : Lepidocaryeae
Genre : Mauritia
Type : Buriti palm
Scientific name
Mauritia flexuosa
Lf

The Buriti palm ( Mauritia flexuosa ) is a species of palm that occurs in northern South America and is widely used by the local population as a food and crop.

features

Buriti palms are large, single-stemmed diocese palms with leaves that are split in the shape of a hand .

The trunk reaches a height of 25–35 m and a diameter of 30–60 cm. The younger parts of the trunk are gray-green to light brown with darker, wavy leaf stigmas at larger intervals. Older trunk parts are light gray to almost white and are relatively smooth. The crown is large and hemispherical, as the living leaves hardly sink below the horizontal. In addition, there are usually a few hanging, dying and dead leaves. The leaves are up to 4.5 m wide. Its stem encompassing and runny at the base petiole is up to 4 m long, light green. The leaves with up to 1 meter long "costa" have a semi- or fan- to almost circular outline and are divided into 100-200 or more folded segments. These are 1–2 meters long, narrow and stiff, with the tips hanging. The segments protrude at different angles, giving the leaf a feathery appearance.

Mauritia flexuosa is dioecious diocesan . The long inflorescences are individual axes with woody röhigen bracts , which protrude horizontally between the sheet bases. Their length is about 1.5-2 m or more. 30 to 60 cm long side axes hang down from these axes and form a kind of curtain. On them are the unisexual, many small and orange flowers . The male flowers stand together in small catkins on tubular, overgrown bracts and the smaller female only appear up to two.

The smooth stone fruits in the hanging, dense and long fruit stands are up to 5–7 cm long, spherical to ellipsoidal or egg-shaped, reddish-brown and covered with slightly overlapping, small rhomboid scales. Inside the leathery skin, in the relatively thin and yellow to orange, fibrous pulp, sits the spherical, white-fleshed, quite smooth, brown, hard stone core with a thin seed skin .

Distribution and locations

Forest dominated by the Buriti palm on the Rio Preguiças , Maranhão , Brazil

The Buriti palm has a fairly large distribution area in northern South America, east of the Andes . It encompasses all of the Amazon with the exception of the easternmost parts and extends from Trinidad to tropical South America.

It always grows in open places, usually along rivers and streams, including swamps. It occurs up to 900 m above sea level. In the swamps of the lowlands it forms extensive stands in which no other tree species arise.

use

Buriti palm fruit
Mauritia flexuosa , edible fruit of the palm

The Buriti palm is widely used by the local population. The fruits are eaten raw, processed into flour or fermented into alcoholic beverages. The oil that is pressed from the fruits has some economic importance in Brazil . The fibers of the young leaves are processed into ropes, hammocks and other things. Mats and paper are made from the pulp of the leaf stalks. Wine and sago starch are obtained from the trunk of felled trees .

literature

  • Robert Lee Riffle, Paul Craft: An Encyclopedia of Cultivated Palms. 4th edition, Timber Press, Portland 2007, ISBN 978-0-88192-558-6 , p. 385.
  • Food and fruit-bearing forest species. 3: Examples from Latin America , FAO Forestry Paper 44/3, FAO, 1986, ISBN 92-5-102372-7 , pp. 185 ff.
  • Jules Janick, Robert E. Paull: The Encyclopedia of Fruit and Nuts. CABI, 2008, ISBN 0-85199-638-8 , pp. 132-135.

Web links

Commons : Buriti Palm ( Mauritia flexuosa )  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Rafaël Govaerts (Ed.): Mauritia - World Checklist of Selected Plant Families of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Last accessed on July 31, 2018.