Angiosperms (Flowering Plants) • Earth.com

Musa maclayi

(Musa maclayi)

galery
en

Description

Musa maclayi is a species of seeded banana native to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. It is placed in section Callimusa (now including the former section Australimusa). It is regarded as one of the progenitors of the Fe'i banana cultivars. The plant has red sap and an upright flowering and fruiting stem. The fruits are rounded and arranged closely together in bunches – partly joined along their edges in some varieties. The species was named after the explorer and naturalist Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, who first described it: "Besides the cultivated varieties, which have been obtained by exchange between the villages, there is to be found in the forest a wild Banana (Musa Maclayi F. v. M.), compared to the cultivated varieties, with a tall stem (nearly twice as tall), with narrow stiff leaves and small (not edible) fruits full of seeds." Musa is one of two or three genera in the family Musaceae. The genus includes flowering plants producing edible bananas and plantains. Around 70 species of Musa are known, with a broad variety of uses. Though they grow as high as trees, banana and plantain plants are not woody and their apparent "stem" is made up of the bases of the huge leaf stalks. Thus, they are technically gigantic herbaceous plants. Banana plants represent some of the largest herbaceous plants existing in the present, with some reaching up to 9 metres (30 ft) in height. The large herb is composed of a modified underground stem (rhizome), a false trunk, a network of roots, and a large flower spike. The false trunk is an aggregation of the basal portion of leaf sheathes; it is not until the plant is ready to flower that a true stem grows up through the sheath and droops back down towards the ground. At the end of this stem grows a peduncle with many female flowers protected by large purple-red bracts. The extension of the stem (this part called the rachis) continues growth downward where a terminal male flower grows. The leaves originate from a pseudostem and unroll to show a leaf blade with two lamina halves. Musa reproduces by both sexual (seed) and asexual (suckers) processes, utilizing asexual means when producing sterile (non-seedy) fruits. Further qualities to distinguish Musa include spirally arranged leaves, fruits as berries, latex-producing cells present, 5 connate and 1 member of the inner whorl distinct, and petiole with one row of air channels.

Taxonomic tree:

Domain:
Kingdom: Plantae
Phylum:
Class: Liliopsida
Order:Zingiberales
Family:Musaceae
Genus:Musa
News coming your way
The biggest news about our planet delivered to you each day