Peach palm - World Agroforestry Centre

1 0 Peach palm. Bactris gasipaes Kunth
7 Mora-Urpí collected Chontilla in 1988, and planted it in the University of Costa Rica germplasm collection.
It looks like a small G. insignis but is found 2000 km from Bolivia and on the other side of the Andes. It has
not been described by a Bactris specialist.
8 MacBride (1960) thought this a nomen nodum, but Glassman (1972) accepted it, renaming it B.
dahlgreniana. Clement et al. (1989) provided extensive numerical data on B. dahlgreniana populations in
Rondonia and Acre, Brazil, and recently found a new population further west in Amazonas.
9 This is the only small-fruited species accepted by Henderson (1995), since he places all other small-fruited
Guilielmas in synonymy with it, but his argument that this is the ancestral form of B. gasipaes essentially
reduces it to synonymy with B. gasipaes.
10 Dugand (1976) suggested that B. caribaea was synonymous with G. macana, but never published a formal
proposal.
11 Mora-Urpí collected Darien in 1986, and planted it in the University of Costa
Rica germplasm collection. It looks somewhat like a B. dahlgreniana or B. macana, but has not been
described by a Bactris specialist.
12 A US-AID financed prospection team collected Ca-Pu in 1984 (Clement and Coradin 1988). It looks like
a Guilielma, but is quite unlike B. gasipaes. Unfortunately, none of the seed germinated, so it is not
represented in any germplasm collection.
13 Collected in 1996 in Cerro Hoya National Park, Panama by J. Mora-Urpí and planted in the University
of Costa Rica germplasm collection. It has not been described.
The distribution of peach palm today involves a complex pattern of landraces (Mora-Urpí
1984; Clement 1988; Mora-Urpí and Clement 1988; Mora-Urpí 1992). It has been divided into
Occidental and Oriental subcomplexes based on vegetative differences (Mora-Urpí 1984), and
further divided into classes based on fruit size (Mora-Urpí and Clement 1988; Mora-Urpí 1992;
Mora-Urpí et al. 1993): the ‘microcarpa’ landraces have small fruits (