''Pandanus prostratus'' ("Vacoas conique") is a species of

plant Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclud ...

in the family

Pandanaceae Pandanaceae is a family of flowering plants native to the tropics and subtropics of the Old World, from West Africa through the Pacific. It contains 982 known species in five genera, of which the type genus, ''Pandanus'', is the most important, wi ...

, endemic to

Mauritius Mauritius ( ; french: Maurice, link=no ; mfe, label=Mauritian Creole, Moris ), officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about off the southeast coast of the African continent, east of Madagascar. It incl ...

Description

A low (3-4m) branching tree, with slender, upturned branches that form a canopy. The trunk is first prostrate but becomes erect as the plant matures. Each stem is topped with a dense tuft of slender, drooping leaves. Older dead leaves are persistent around the stems just below the tuft. The leaves have white spines that are densest near the upper bit of the leaf, and darker and rarer lower down. This species is also distinguished by its oblong fruit-heads, appearing first erect and then drooping. Each fruit-head is packed with uniseriate rows of long, narrow drupes. The exposed portions of the drupes are pale grey, and the internal portion becomes light yellow when ripe. Occasionally this species bears more than one fruit-head on the same peduncle. This feature is normally only found in the extinct '' Pandanus conglomeratus''.

Habitat

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 ...

, and isolated individuals can still be found in thickets in the highlands. It often grows alongside the common and widespread '' Pandanus eydouxia''.Roskov Y., Abucay L., Orrell T., Nicolson D., Bailly N., Kirk P.M., Bourgoin T., DeWalt R.E., Decock W., De Wever A., Nieukerken E. van, Zarucchi J., Penev L., eds. (2018). ''Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life'', 20 December 2017. Digital resource at www.catalogueoflife.org/col. Species 2000: Naturalis, Leiden, the Netherlands. ISSN 2405-8858.

References

prostratus Endemic flora of Mauritius Taxa named by Isaac Bayley Balfour {{Pandanales-stub