''Symplocos octopetala'' is a species of evergreen woody plant with small white flowers in the family

Symplocaceae Symplocaceae is a family of flowering plants in the order Ericales, including two genera, ''Symplocos ''Symplocos'' is a genus of flowering plants in the order Ericales. It contains about 300 species distributed in Asia and the Americas. Man ...

. It is

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

. First described in 1788, the most recent concept of the species includes three taxa described as separate species in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Description

''Symplocos octopetala'' is a woody evergreen which ranges in dimension from a shrub to a tree tall. The leaves, which are long and wide, are alternately arranged along the branches. The small white flowers are borne on short inflorescences each with one to three flowers.

Taxonomy

The species is one of an estimated 340 species in the genus. In their 2015 monograph of Antillean members of the genus ''Symplocos'' Peter Fritsch and Frank Almeda placed ''S. octopetala'' in the

subgenus In biology, a subgenus (plural: subgenera) is a taxonomic rank directly below genus. In the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, a subgeneric name can be used independently or included in a species name, in parentheses, placed between t ...

''Symplocos'', section ''Symplocos'', series ''Symplocos'', a clade of about 154 species that is restricted to the Neotropics. Most treatments of Jamaican members of the genus recognised the presence of several species on the island. Fritsch and Almeda, on the other hand, considered all Jamaican ''Symplocos'' to belong to a single species, ''S. octopetala''; in their opinion, the characters that were used to distinguish between species to be part of the continuous variation within a single species. They considered ''S. jamaicensis'', ''S. tubulifera'' and ''S. harrisii'' to be synonyms of ''S. octopetala''.

History

''Symplocos octopetala'' was first described in 1788 by Swedish botanist Olof Swartz based on specimens he had collected in Jamaica. In 1893 German botanists

Karl Wilhelm Leopold Krug Karl (or Carl) Wilhelm Leopold Krug (January 7, 1833 – April 4, 1898) was a German businessman, naturalist, ethnographer, diplomat and supporter of scientific collections. Early life and education Born on the estate of Mühlenbeck in the vici ...

and Ignatz Urban described ''S. tubulifera'' based on collections made by R. C. Alexander Prior and ''S. jamaicensis'' based on collections by W. Purdie. In 1912

August Brand August Brand (19 August 1863 – 17 September 1930) was a German philologist and botanist. Brand was born in Berlin. He studied classical philology at Bonn and Berlin, obtaining his doctorate in 1885 with the thesis "De dialectis Aeolicis quae ...

described a fourth Jamaican species, ''S. harrisii'' based on a 1909 collection by W. Harris. In his 1972 ''Flowering Plants of Jamaica'' C. Dennis Adams placed ''S. jamaicensis'' in synonymy with the more widespread species, '' S. martinicensis'', while Dieter Hans Mai considered it a subspecies, ''S. martinicensis'' subsp. ''jamaicensis''. Mai also considered ''S. harrisii'' a synonymy of ''S. tubulifera''.

Conservation

Based on the fact that the species is endemic to Jamaica and only known from 10 localities on the island, Fritsch and Almeda re-classified it as Vulnerable.

References

External links

Type specimen
collected by Olof Swartz at the

Swedish Museum of Natural History The Swedish Museum of Natural History ( sv, Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, literally, the National Museum of Natural History), in Stockholm, is one of two major museums of natural history in Sweden, the other one being located in Gothenburg. The ...

{{Taxonbar, from=Q5437080 octopetala Near threatened plants Endemic flora of Jamaica Plants described in 1788 Taxonomy articles created by Polbot Taxa named by Olof Swartz