Coccoloba spicata, with no English name, is a small tree native to the Neotropics. It belongs to the family Polygonaceae.
Description Coccoloba spicata can be distinguished from many similar species of the genus Coccoloba by these key features:
It grows up to tall with hairless stems up to in diameter. Ochrea surrounding stems where petioles attach loosely are up to high, sometimes larger, and bear stiff, reddish hairs when they emerge but soon become hairless.
Leathery, somewhat stiff leaves with petioles up to long bear blades up to and wide; they are hairless except for along veins on the undersurface. Blade margins bear no indentations, teeth or projections, and their tips vary from rounded to a somewhat pointed, while their broad bases bear two backward-projecting lobes of various sizes. Normally 5 to 7 secondary veins branch off the midvein.
Inflorescences are up to long and in flower are so slender that they appear stringy. The inflorescence's rachis bears low bumps, or "nodules," crowded along its length, with 1 or 2 flowers arising from each one. Flowers and the later fruits bear no pedicels.
Flowers functionally are unisexual. Flower clusters are loosely surrounded below by papery, collar-like, variously hairy modified leaves known as bracteoles, or "ocreolae," which are to about high. The perianth tube, or hypanthium, is about long. Pictures on this page show male flowers. Female flowers have a 3-cornered ovary with 3 styles.
Achene-type fruits are surrounded by the fleshy perianth tube, are nearly spherical, about long and a little less across, and with a rounded top not bulging or nipple-like as in similar species.
Distribution In Mexico, Coccoloba spicata occurs in the states of Campeche, Chiapas, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz and Yucatán. Also it occurs in adjacent Guatemala and Belize.
Habitat In Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Coccoloba spicata occurs in dry and moist forests of various kinds.
Uses by humans
In Mayan ceremonies In Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the Mayan people wrap the sturdy leaves of Coccoloba spicata around special breads offered during the Cha chaak ritual, asking for rain.
As rafters in roofs In Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the traditional thatched roofs of the Mayan people employ the trunks of larger Coccoloba spicata trees, which they call "Boob," as rafters to which the palm-leaf thatch is secured.
Taxonomy In 1939 when Cyrus Longworth Lundell formally described and named Coccoloba spicata, he chose as his type specimen one of his own collections, #7325 from 1938 "... collected in young legume thicket around Sacred Cenote, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico."
Phylogeny Molecular phylogenetic analysis has determined that Coccoloba spicata belongs to the authors' "Meso-Caribbean Clade 1," where it is sister to a clade containing C. barbadense, C. liebmannii, C. cozumelensis, C. tuerckheimii, C. nodosa and C. longifolia.
Etymology The genus name Coccoloba derives from the Greek coccos, meaning "seed or berry," and lobos, meaning "capsule or pod," alluding to the fleshy hypanthium surrounding the fruit.
The species name spicata is from the Latin spicatus, meaning "bearing or resembling a spike," referring to this species' long, slender inflorescences, which botanically are known as spikes.
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