The elusive Musa jackeyi

Ten years ago I introduced the readers of Green Path to Australia’s two species of wild banana, Musa banksii and Musa jackeyi. At that time I had seen the former growing in rainforest several times but hadn’t tried the fruit. I hadn’t even seen the latter.

I eventually tried the fruit of M. banksii, but I still haven’t seen M. jackeyi. Odd snippets of information have come my way, however, and I thought it was time to pull them all together, supplementing them with what further information I could find online.

I will list and link my sources only once, at the foot of the page, and point to them via inline short-form references, e.g., [GP: wild bananas] and [GP: taste-test] for my own earlier articles.

Elusive

The IUCN lists the species as Endangered (EN) [wiki:jackeyi and iNat].

It is so little known that it hasn’t even got a proper common name. “Erect banana” and “wild banana” [ATRP and others] are too vague. Ploetz [Ploetz] calls it the “Johnstone River Banana” but no-one else does.

I noted eighteen months ago [GP: taste test] that there are no observations at all on iNaturalist. That is still true. The organisation does have a basic page about the species [iNat] but it is populated with photos recycled from other sites. Searching online for more photos was quite (negatively) informative: the same few photos, therefore the same few specimens, appear repeatedly. This distinctive image, for instance, appears on at least four of the sites I consulted.

Searching for articles produces similarly negative results. Wikipedia and the usual botanical sites all mention M. jackeyi, but none of them have much information and all of them borrow heavily from, and reference, each other. A few relevant scientific papers were found but their focus is on bananas in cultivation, or the genetics of the family, meaning that M. jackeyi is mentioned only in passing if at all.

Rare

But perhaps we can see live specimens in, e.g., botanical gardens. Perhaps.

Don Lawie wrote in the SGAP Cairns branch Newsletter No 234 October, 2023, in an article which was mostly about M. banksii:

We visited the Johnstone River Landcare Group in Innisfail and had a fascinating discussion with their leader, Adrian Hogg, about native bananas. Adrian is an expert on these plants and he has grown a specimen each of Musa banksii and Musa jackeyi, about three meters apart so that the differences can easily be seen.

Cairns Botanical Gardens had this post on its facebook page in March 2024 [Cairns]. It’s so informative that I’m going to quote it in full, because facebook posts are such disfunctional reference sources.

The sad story of one of our native banana species, Musa jackeyi…

There are a couple of native banana species in Far North Queensland. One of these is Musa jackeyi, which has only been found at low altitudes in rainforest around Babinda and Daintree. Ten to fifteen years ago, it was relatively easy to see this plant growing by roadsides through forested areas near Babinda, but recently, numbers of wild plants have crashed and botanists are now concerned that this species may become extinct in the wild in the near future.

At Cairns Botanic Gardens, we had a small stand of Musa jackeyi by the edge of a footpath near the Botanic Gardens Visitor Centre. Last year, we removed two plants and relocated them to the Conservatory, where they are thriving. This week, we removed the remaining plants as one had fallen down while flowering and the other was looking quite poor. Once these plants have completed their rehab, they will be reunited with their ‘friends’ in the Conservatory, where they will form an important display that highlights how threatened some of our native plant species have become. Sadly, until more wild plants can be found and propagated, this is likely to be one of very few places where living examples of this species can be easily viewed by the public for the foreseeable future.

Additional edit: chances are, if you see native bananas around Cairns, or on the Tablelands, it’ll be Musa banksii – another native species that is still very common and has a wide distribution in the Wet Tropics. The simplest way to distinguish them is when they are in flower or fruit. If the flowers and fruit hang downwards in a similar manner to typical Cavendish bananas, then it is Musa banksii. If the inflorescence grows straight upwards and has tiny, oval, orange bananas on it, then it’s M. jackeyi.

Range

All sources agree that the range of M. jackeyi is, broadly, coastal North Queensland, but it’s actually only two tiny parts of that, around Babinda (near Innisfail) and the Daintree [DES, Cairns, ATRP].

Australian Tropical Rainforest Plants [ATRP], for instance, says:

Distribution and Ecology
Endemic to NEQ, known only from a few collections in the Innisfail-Babinda and the Daintree River areas. Altitudinal range from near sea level to 50 m. Grows in disturbed areas in lowland rain forest.

None of my sources offer any suggestion as to why the species should only be found in those small areas, but those are the two wettest parts of our coast (of all of tropical Australia, in fact) and I think that’s the reason.

Appearance

ATRP has the most detailed description. I will shorten it here:

Grows to a height of 10 m or more with a ‘stem’ diameter of 45 cm but also flowers and fruits when smaller. Leaf blades quite large, about 200-450 x 60 cm. Inflorescence large (up to 1.5 m long), erect (or erect except for the nodding apex) … Terminal flowers male, enclosed in an ovoid, multilayered sheath of overlapping bracts. Female and/or hermaphrodite flowers confined to the lower part of the inflorescence. Infructescence erect. Individual fruits +/- sessile, 4-6.5 x 2.4-4 cm, seeds numerous, black, about 5-8 mm diam.

That description is colourblind. [Wiki: fe’i] makes up for it:

Fe’i bananas can be distinguished from other kinds of cultivated bananas and plantains in a number of ways. They have highly coloured sap, pink through to bright magenta and dark purple. The bracts of the flowering spike (inflorescence) are bright shiny green rather than dull red or purple. The flowering and fruiting stem is more or less upright (rather than drooping), so that the bunches of bananas are also upright. Ripe fruit has brilliant orange, copper-coloured or red skin with orange or yellow flesh inside. It has prominent ridges, making it squarish in cross-section.

No, that isn’t a description of M. jackeyi, but it matches photos [e.g. ATRP, iNat, wiki:jackeyi] of M. jackeyi point for point; the description in [Ploetz], too:

Johnstone River banana … greatly resembles a Fe‘i, with upright fruit stalk, Fe‘i-like bananas, an enormous green bud pointing skyward, and “bloody” sap. May be synonymous with M. maclayi subsp. ailuluai.

Evolution and taxonomy

Where does Musa jackeyi sit in the tree of life?

As I said ten years ago, banana taxonomy is a nightmare: there are too many hybrids and cultivars, across too many countries and languages, across several thousand years of cultivation. M. jackeyi, however, turned out to have a remarkably simple and obvious history.

• The banana family, Musaceae, has three main branches, Ensete (false bananas), Musella (a single Chinese species) and Musa (all the bananas we know and love). [wiki:musaceae and wiki: musella]
• Musa is currently (since 2013) divided into two ‘sections’. [ProMusa] Most of the world’s bananas (including M. banksii) are in Musa but M. Jackeyi is in the other, Callimusa, along with most of the species domesticated in the Pacific, the Fe’i bananas.

[wiki: fe’i] says:

Fe’i bananas are clearly part of section Callimusa (in particular the species formerly grouped as section Australimusa). However, their precise origins are unclear. On the basis of appearance (morphology), Musa maclayi, native to Papua New Guinea, has been proposed as a parent. More recent genetic studies suggest they are close to M. lolodensis and M. peekelii, both from New Guinea and neighbouring islands. Fe’i bananas may be hybrids between several different wild species. They are generally considered to have originated in New Guinea and then to have been spread eastwards and northwards (as far as the Hawaiian Islands) for use as food.

This aligns very neatly with the DNA study [Christelová], especially its fig 3 and table 5, which concludes that Australimusa split from the rest of Callimusa about 8.8 mya and Fe’i only split from the rest of the Australimusa about 2.5 mya, the last split in the family tree. If [ATRP] is colourblind, [Christelová] is location-blind; but there isn’t much doubt about the geography.

[Christelová] doesn’t mention M. jackeyi at all so I am relying here on its close relationship to M. maclayi [Ploetz, Sharrock], which seems safe enough. There are no obstacles to its natural spread from our North over the last two million years since New Guinea and Australia have often been connected by a land bridge.

A northern origin is consistent with its restricted present range, too, since New Guinea is generally wetter than even our Wet Tropics; most of the country enjoys an annual rainfall above 2000 mm [PNG rain] . (That’s in recent years, of course. I haven’t located climatology for the Pleistocene, but I assume that the climates of tropical Australia and New Guinea would tend to change in tandem.)

All things considered, there is very little doubt that M. jackeyi is a wild southern descendant of the wild New Guinean ancestor of the Fe’i.

Incidentally…

As it converged on a result, this project increasingly reminded me of my similar search for the origins of Australia’s native citrus [GP: citrus]. Its result is similar, too, since our citrus are descended from wild northern ancestors of domesticated citrus.

References

Green Path
[GP: wild bananas] https://malcolmtattersall.com.au/wp/2014/10/wild-bananas/
[GP: taste-test] https://malcolmtattersall.com.au/wp/2023/04/taste-testing-australias-wild-bananas/
[GP: citrus] https://malcolmtattersall.com.au/wp/2023/03/finger-limes/

Wikipedia
[wiki: musaceae] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musaceae
[wiki: musella] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musella_lasiocarpa
[wiki: jackeyi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_jackeyi
[wiki: fe’i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fe%27i_banana

[iNat] iNaturalist https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/taxa/1449199-Musa-jackeyi

[Ploetz] Banana and plantain—an overview with emphasis on Pacific island cultivars Musaceae (banana family) Randy C. Ploetz, Angela Kay Kepler, Jeff Daniells, and Scot C. Nelson http://agroforestry.net/images/pdfs/Banana-plantain-overview.pdf

[Sharrock] Diversity in the genus Musa: Focus on Australimusa Suzanne Sharrock, INIBAP, Montpellier, France, in Networking: Banana and Plantain Annual Report 2000, INIBAP https://web.archive.org/web/20130513080423/http://www.bioversityinternational.org/fileadmin/bioversity/publications/pdfs/664_Networking_Banana_and_Plantain.pdf

[AVH] Australasian Virtual Herbarium https://bie.ala.org.au/species/https://id.biodiversity.org.au/node/apni/2891713

[ATRP] ATRP Australian Tropical Rainforest Plants https://apps.lucidcentral.org/rainforest/text/entities/musa_jackeyi.htm

[ProMusa] https://www.promusa.org/Musa+sections

[Christelová] Christelová P, Valárik M, Hibová E, De Langhe E, Doležel J. A multi gene sequence-based phylogeny of the Musaceae (banana) family. BMC Evol Biol. 2011 Apr 16;11:103. doi: 10.1186/1471-2148-11-103. PMID: 21496296; PMCID: PMC3102628. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3102628/

[Cairns] https://www.cairns.qld.gov.au/experience-cairns/botanic-gardens and https://www.facebook.com/CairnsBotanicGardens

[DES] https://apps.des.qld.gov.au/species-search/details/?id=13832

[PNG rain] https://png-data.sprep.org/dataset/mean-annual-precipitation