Heliconias are the oldest known hummingbird-pollinated plants on Earth
Lobster-claw heliconias arose in the Late Eocene, about 39 million years ago, making them the oldest known lineage of plants pollinated by hummingbirds. Their blazing waxy bracts hide small true flowers shaped so precisely that often only certain local hummingbirds can reach the nectar inside.
Heliconia is the only genus in its family, Heliconiaceae, with 194 known species. Most live in the tropical Americas, though a few are native to western Pacific islands and Maluku in Indonesia. Carl Linnaeus named the genus in 1771 after Mount Helicon in central Greece. Once lumped with bananas in Musaceae, it was given its own family by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group in 1998 and placed beside the bananas in the order Zingiberales, a position APG IV kept in 2016.
The plants are herbaceous yet large, standing from half a metre to nearly 4.5 m tall, with leaves that can reach 300 cm and form big clumps. Their inflorescences stand upright or hang down in shades of red, orange, yellow and green. Common names such as toucan beak, wild plantain and false bird-of-paradise reflect the resemblance to Strelitzia. Ripe fruits are blue-purple and spread mainly by birds, although mammals eat the most seeds after they fall.
Hermit hummingbirds depend heavily on heliconias, and the rufous-breasted hermit even nests in them. One species breaks the pattern: in the Solomon Islands, Heliconia solomonensis has green flowers that open at night and is pollinated by the bat Melonycteris woodfordi, its only known nocturnal pollinator.
Bats use the leaves as architecture too. The Honduran white bat snips the side veins branching from a leaf's midrib so the blade folds into a tent, a daytime roost that keeps off rain and sun and hides it from predators. Because the leaf stalks are too weak to hold a typical predator, any shaking warns the roosting bats. Two Artibeus species build tents the same way. Most heliconias are listed as vulnerable or data deficient by the IUCN, while several are grown as ornamentals and have gone wild in Florida, Gambia and Thailand.
Source: Heliconia
