[6] Jean-Christophe Pintaud and colleagues provided a table of differences in anatomical leaf characteristics in 2008, which are rather subtle and require a microscope.

The key provided notes the following differences: A. mexicanum has a thinner trunk without persistent leaf bases, but armed with rings or groups of flattened spines; smaller flowers with a proportionally smaller calyx and distinct, tooth-like staminodes (as opposed to staminodes merged into a ring); fruit with more but shorter spines; and the nut with the three pores positioned close to the apex (as opposed to up to a third of the distance from it).

[9] Astrocaryum alatum was first described in 1939 by Harold F. Loomis, an agronomist working at the U.S. Plant Introduction Garden, Coconut Grove, Florida (and also an important millipede expert).

[5][10] The 1939 article itself remarks that it is strange such a large, common and obvious plant in a well-known region had only attracted the attention of a taxonomist so late in history.

[9] This name had apparently first appeared in a 1885 publication by William Hemsley in the series Biologia Centrali-Americana, but attributed to the German palm expert Hermann Wendland, and said to grow in Costa Rica, citing a type kept in Kew which was collected along the Sarapiquí River.

[11][12] A. polystachyum is now considered a synonym of A. confertum,[13] but Pittier is clearly referring to A. alatum in his work, based on his description and the range he gives.

[9] As such an author of 1939 article had stayed at the town of El Cairo, Costa Rica, in 1937 and 1938, collecting specimens and seeds of the palm and calling it A. polystachyum.

[5][a] Loomis did not designate a single holotype, it is difficult to fit all the representative organs of a large palm on a single herbarium sheet, but a type series of sheets of palm parts, stored at the United States National Herbarium, collected "along the Río Hondo near the fields of Santa Clara" by Orator F. Cook and C. B. Doyle in 1903.

In 2011 a group containing some of the previous authors published a study which looked at the differences between related palms in a number of plastid DNA and nuclear markers in order to elucidate their phylogeny.

This study found strong evidence that A. alatum and A. mexicanum form a monophyletic group sister to the remaining Astrocaryum species.

[3][19] It can germinate and survive in soft, watery mud, as well as firm soil, but avoids constantly submerged ground.

[20] Most of this habitat is found in the lowlands along the Caribbean coast, and it is very common within Barra del Colorado Wildlife Refuge[20] and Tortuguero National Park in Costa Rica,[3][20] extending deep into central eastern Nicaragua,[21] but also is recorded to occur in Caño Negro Wildlife Refuge, and along the Pacific coast in the Osa Peninsula in the Sierpe region (Térraba-Sierpe National Wetlands).

[20] M. saccifera shares this habitat with the palms A. alatum and Euterpe spp., with the most common broad-leaf trees being Calophyllum brasiliense, Symphonia globulifera, Carapa guianensis and Dialium guianense.

[20][21] Astrocaryum mexicanum takes the place of A. alatum in otherwise extremely similar Manicaria swamp in Belize to the north of the range of A.

[21] Manatees often move into the deeper channels found in these swamps in order to feed on aquatic plants (Ludwigia and Hydrilla).

There are no species endemic to such habitats, overall herpetofauna biodiversity is low and similar to surrounding lands, but larger mammals may frequently briefly forage in these areas when the ground dries.

In this system A. alatum is a frequent species, but never a dominant, in four main types of lowland forests, including the two ecosystems discussed above.

[21] A well-drained, tall-growing, ground-cover-poor rainforest characterised along the Térraba River at 800m elevation near Pacific coast of Costa Rica, on a substrate of latosols, soil from marine sediments and some inceptisols, found A. alatum to be a frequently occurring species, along with Ardisia spp., Aspidosperma myristicifolia, Caryocar costaricense, Coccoloba padiformis, C. standleyana, C. tuerckheimii, Cordia gerascanthus, Cryosophila guarara, Eleagia auriculata, Genipa americana, Gustavia angustifolia,[d] Jacaratia costaricensis and Socratea spp..

In Nicaragua, this type of rainforest commonly occurs in valleys and lower elevations in hilly terrain, and vegetation largely mixes with that of more well-drained soils on the hills.

[24] The scarab beetle Cyclocephala amazona was found to visit the flowers in Panama, among a number of other palms and other plants.

They feed exclusively on palms, but of 506 food plant records, only five are from A. alatum (almost two thirds are from Chamaedorea tepejilote, the rest from another twelve species).

Like a number of other Astrocaryum investigated,[28][29] it appears to be almost completely dependent on a single species, an agouti (Dasyprocta punctata), for most of the seed dispersal.

[24] The agouti collects the fruits, cleans them of their pulp to stop that from attracting other animals, and caches the seeds, burying them in the soil usually near an object such as a rock, a fallen tree branch, or a buttress root.

[24] Proechimys semispinosus is known to scatter-hoard Astrocaryum as well, and are very common animals,[30] but field observations and camera traps found that the mammals interacting with the palm seeds on the forest floor were overwhelmingly peccaries and agoutis.

[32][33][34] The palm is actually very abundant and widespread,[3][35] but another taxon, Astrocaryum confertum-a very similar species to A. standleyanum, was formerly only known from a single 19th century collection in Costa Rica, the holotype copy of which had been lost with the Allied fire bombing of the Berlin museum and botanical garden and the only surviving isotype housed at Kew.

After the name was encountered in the old literature by Grayum in 1988, and it was decided to see if the species was valid and might still be found growing in the area, A. confertum was quickly rediscovered.

[12] Andrew Henderson, who was compiling the palms for the IUCN for the first worldwide 1997 red list of threatened plants (eventually published in 1998),[32] doubted the validity of the rediscovery of A. confertum at the time, stating "it is possibly conspecific with A. alatum" in his submission about the taxon,[33] as in his 1995 book about the palms of the region, which he used as the main reference.

[37] The information appears to have gotten mixed up when entered into the first IUCN database built in the 1990s, with the entry in the 1998 Red List book being under the heading A. alatum instead of A. confertum.

[32] For more than two decades afterwards this mistake was repeated in the new online versions of the IUCN Red List, only now the conservation status was furthermore mistakenly changed to "lower risk: near threatened".

The author mostly only looked at Costa Rica, where the species is common, but he noted that it might be possible that the species could be said to maybe become rarer if in the future pineapples could be grown in the National Parks in the swamps along the Caribbean coast, and if the reader ignores the map provided by the webpage and pretends A. alatum only grows on a few square kilometres.