Did you know that pangolins grow on trees?
North Coast, South Africa (06 January 2025) – Well, not really, but the Raphia australis, also known as the Kosi palm, nearly had us fooled.
SA’s David Attenborough, Leon Kluge, has cleansed our feeds with another good dose of green! This time, we learn about the Kosi palm. A staggeringly tall monocarpic tree that grows along the north-eastern coastal swamp forests of KwaZulu-Natal and Mozambique.
What makes this tree particularly interesting, beyond its enormous leaves that grow to out-measure the length of a London bus, is that it also produces a strikingly beautiful fruit that resembles the geometric scales of a pangolin.
This fruit attracts one of the rarest and most unique birds in Africa, the palm-nut vulture.
One would think vultures generally stick to flesh and bones, but this raptor has a taste for fruit!
In fact, they love palm-nuts so much, they build their nests along the crowns of the Kosi palm. When fruit is ready for harvest, they’ll devour it and drop its scale-like shells into the swamps.
That is how they’ve become the main distributors of the palm. How cool.
It’s never too late to learn something new about nature. Thanks Leon!
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