Musa jackeyi
Musa jackeyi, commonly known as Johnstone River banana or erect banana, is a rare species of plant in the banana family Musaceae. It is restricted to a very small part of the Wet Tropics bioregion of Queensland, Australia, and has the conservation status of critically endangered.
Description
Stem and leaves
Musa jackeyi is a large perennial herb with an underground rhizome. It may reach a height of about with a dark reddish-brown pseudostem about diameter. The "stem", like all bananas, is not a true stem but rather it is herbaceous, consisting of successively overlapping, each wrapped by all the earlier sheaths, thus forming a column-like structure. The leaves are simple, about long or longer, wide, with a petiole about long. There are numerous lateral veins running at 90° to the midrib. The sap of this species is red.Flowers
The inflorescence emerges from the top of the pseudostem, and, unlike most other bananas, it grows vertically and the bracts surrounding the flowers are green. It may reach up to in height. Both male and female/hermaphrodite flowers are about long and wide.Fruit
The fruits are berries in botanical terms, about long and wide and tightly clustered together. They contain numerous hard black seeds up to diameter.Distribution and habitat
This species is known from only six locations, three from the area between Bellenden Ker and Innisfail about south of Cairns, and the other three from near the Daintree River about north of Cairns. It grows in alluvial soils in disturbed areas of rainforest, from near sea level to about altitude. Its area of occupancy is estimated at just. Little is known about the population trend.Taxonomy
This species was first described in 1874 by Walter Hill, who was the curator of what was then known as the Brisbane Botanic Garden. The description was published in an appendix to his report to the Queensland Parliament about the Garden.The genus Musa has in the past been divided into a number of sections, initially based on morphology and later on chromosome numbers. By the mid twentieth century there were four sections, namely,, and, however it was becoming apparent that this arrangement was flawed. In 2001, Carol Wong et al. published a paper describing their inability to place three newly-described species within the existing framework, and in the following year Wong published a new paper reducing the number of sections to just two, and. As a result this species was moved from to.