Coconut Ecomuseum: The rarest! Chimeric Coconut Palm giving pink fruits and bicolor leaves from Ecuador

Chimeric Coconut Palm giving pinkinsh fruits and bicolor leaves

Thousands of gardeners and landscapers would be ready to spend 100 USD or more just to get one of this rare coconut palms!. Do you have this rare kind in your region? In 20 years, we found just one like this!

It is called "Chimera coconut palm", have mixed green and white/yellow leaf color, produces big round-flat brown coconut with a pinkish tint inside the young husk.

A plant is called a chimera when cells of more than one genotype (genetic code) are found growing in juxtaposition in the tissues of that plant. Plants with variegated foliage are perhaps the most common types of chimaeras.

A rare natural mutation

The cells of a variegated leaf all arise from the shoot apical meristem, but some are characterized by the inability to synthesize chlorophyll. These appear white rather than green, even though they are components of the same cellular system. Chimeras occur when a cell mutates. This mutation can be spontaneous or it can be induced by irradiation or treatment with mutagenic chemicals. In our case, this is 100% natural!

Chimeric plants can be classified based on the position and relative proportion of mutated versus non-mutated cells in the apical meristem. Mericlinal chimeras are produced when the derivatives of the mutated cell do not entirely cover the apical dome. A layer of mutated cells can persist on only one part of the meristem giving rise to chimeric shoots or leaves which develop in this part while those which develop on all other parts of the meristem are normal, non-chimeric shoots. Periclinal chimeras are produced when derivatives of the mutated cell completely cover the apical dome. They are the most important category since they are relatively stable and can be propagated vegetatively.

An unknown and uncontrolled factor subsists

In the case of the coconut palm, can this kind of characteristic be reproduced by seednuts? This is far from 100% sure.

It is quite common to observe mutations in the nursery with the leaves of the seedlings completely white, devoid of chlorophyll. In general, these plants do not survive long.

Mericlinal and sectorial chimaeras are inherently very unstable and the probability of propagating plants with the same morphological pattern is low. Periclinal chimeras are very stable and in a few cases (such as Chlorophytum variegata) the chimera is the most common commercially available form.

We therefore advised the owner to collect seednuts and transfer them to the nursery to find out if they reproduce variegated coconut palms. Note that the presence of the pink color marker, which is also found at the level of the tips of the young roots, will greatly help in selecting the plants resulting from self-fertilization, which are more likely to reproduce the variegated characteristic.