Bactris jamaicana

Bactris jamaicana is a spiny palm with pinnately-compound leaves which grows in multi-stemmed clumps. These clumps usually consist of five to 30 stems ranging from 5 to 15 metres (16 to 49 ft) tall and 7.5 to 11.3 centimetres (3.0 to 4.4 in) in diameter. Stems normally bear 3 to 7 leaves. Male flowers are white, female flowers cream to pale yellow. The fruit are orange or red when mature, 9 to 11.8 millimetres (0.35 to 0.46 in) long.^[3]

Three species of Bactris are native to the Greater Antilles—B. jamaicana, which is endemic to Jamaica, B. plumeriana which is endemic to Hispaniola, and B. cubensis, which is endemic to Cuba. Virginia Salzman and Walter Judd found that these three species formed a clade—they are more closely related to one another than they are to other species within the genus.^[3]

In the second volume of his book A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1725), Irish physician and naturalist Hans Sloane includes a description of a species of palm he names Prickly-Pole,^[4] which Salzman and Judd identified as Bactris jamaicensis. Olof Swartz included the species in Cocos acicularis Sw. in 1788, but transferred it to C. guineensis (L.) Sw. in 1791^[3] (now considered a synonym of B. guineensis).^[5]

In his 1864 Flora of the British West Indies, August Grisebach lumped all Greater Antillean Bactris species into B. plumeriana. Odoardo Beccari maintained this classification in his 1912 work, The palms indigenous to Cuba. Max Burret had more specimens to work with, thanks to the collections of Erik Ekman and others in Cuba and Hispaniola, and was able to determine that plants from Cuba belonged to a separate species which he named B. cubensis. Liberty Hyde Bailey's collections from Jamaica allowed him to separate Jamaican plants into a new species which he named B. jamaicana in 1938.^[3]