Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Palms ca. 4–5 m tall.

Stems: Trunk ca. 20 cm in diameter.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. The crown typically contains fifteen to twenty ascending, spreading, and sometimes drooping leaves. Blades ca. 88 cm long from ligule to apex. Leaf segments with long, very acuminate drooping points with long filaments between them. Upper surfaces pale green and glabrous; lower surfaces with scattered small, elongate–elliptic, entire, hyaline lepidia. Veins parallel. Petioles ca. 85 cm long, lower surface densely ephemerally brown tomentose, upper surface sparsely silvery white tomentose, becoming glabrate, lower costae of blade with broad, long, silky, pale brown, translucent palea on lower surface. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences ca. 52 cm long, shorter than petioles, panicles 10–13 cm long, of a few 2– partite branches in its lower part and of simple floriferous branchlets elsewhere; rachillae erect or vermiformly twisted and covered throughout with a dirty grayish brown tomentum, somewhat angular and marked with conspicuously spirally alternate notches for the insertion of the flowers; prophyll and peduncular bracts glabrate, but with a grayish ephemeral scattered wool toward apex. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sessile. Calyx cupular, shallowly 3-lobed, prominently nerved or smooth when dry. 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 black; glossy; subglobose; 2–2.2 cm in diameter. 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: Rare in a mesic gulch above Kamalo and near or at Puako'olau; ; leeward Moloka'i.

Elevation Range: ca. 610 m.