It was also formerly found on the small islets of St Pierre, Chauve-Souris, and Ile Ronde (Round Island), all located near Praslin, but had become extinct there for a time[quantify] until recently[when?]

[14] While the functional characteristics of Lodoicea are similar to other trees of monodominant forests in the humid tropics, its unique features include a huge seed, effective funnelling mechanism and diverse community of closely associated animals.

[16] It holds eleven botanical records: Of the six endemic palms in Seychelles, it is the only dioecious species, with male and female flowers on different plants.

[32] L. maldivica is robust, solitary, up to 30 m tall with an erect, spineless, stem which is ringed with leaf scars (Calstrom, unpublished).

[7] The palm leaves form a huge funnel that intercepts particulate material, especially pollen, which is flushed to the base of the trunk when it rains.

The staminate inflorescence is catkin-like, one to two metres long by about three inches (8 centimeters) in width and produces pollen over a period of 8 to ten years.

[36] Despite the Seychelles’ proximity to Africa, the broader diversity of palm life on the islands are considered to be slightly closer phylogenetically to that of south Asia;[16] with members of the palm subtribe Oncospermatinae occurring both in the Seychelles group and in the Mascarene Islands, Sri Lanka, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, and the Philippines.

[37] The Borassus and Borassodendron genera together include species in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, India, New Guinea, and Madagascar;[38] thus this study provided genetic evidence for the suspected close relationships between Lodoicea and south Asian palms.

This hypothesis derives from the geologic formation of the Seychelles themselves, and offers a strong explanation of Lodoicea’s modern day close relation to Asiatic palms.

Though modern viable coco de mer fruits are too heavy to float and thus would be unable to disperse oceanically, genetic evidence suggests that ancestors to Lataniieae palms underwent evolutionary periods of relatively rapid increases in seed size, with the Lodoicea serving as the most extreme example.

Despite their relative recency of this divergence from the common ancestor shared with other palms, Lodoicea are unique across a variety of traits.

[37] For this reason, the ecological and genetic factors explaining the large size of Lodoicea’s fruit to such an extreme are of particular interest to evolutionary biologists.

[40] Agricultural surveys of the Seychelles tend to categorize the islands as having very shallow, nutrient-poor soils,[41] and the life-cycle of the coco de mer often involves a very long period of subterranean transversal of the primary apical shoot after fertilization and excision from the parent tree, wherein the growing plant cannot use solar radiation to undergo photosynthesis [citation needed].

These facts may jointly act as evolutionary incentives for the development of large, nutrient rich fruits, to feed the growing plant and increase likelihood of successful reproduction.

Therefore, there exists a selective pressure favoring the production of fewer offspring, each with a maximal chance of successfully reaching adulthood conferred by large energy reserves in the fruit.

This is perhaps corroborated by the coco de mer’s noted ability to quickly produce a very large first stem and leaf,[40] perhaps suggesting that fast and robust initial growth is indeed heavily selected towards.

European nobles in the sixteenth century would often have the shells of these nuts polished and decorated with valuable jewels as collectibles for their private galleries.

[22] Lodoicea maldivica is officially classified as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with only approximately 8,000 wild mature trees left as of 2019.

[44] The main populations of Lodoicea maldivica are found within the Praslin and Curieuse National Parks,[43] and the trade in nuts is controlled by the Coco-de-mer (Management) Decree of 1995.

[43] Cultivated palms are grown on a number of other islands and are widely present in botanic gardens; although the collection of seeds in order to recruit these populations may be a further threat to the remaining natural stands.

[45] This article incorporates text from the ARKive fact-file "Lodoicea" under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GFDL.