Real Fan Palm

 
Setswana Name:  Mokolwane
 
Botanical Name: 

Hyphaene petersiana

 
Family:

Palm Family (Arecaceae)
 

The palm tree epitomises the Okavango Delta. Images of a magnificent sunset with palm trees in silhouette, comes to mind when thinking of the Real Fan Palm.  Not only does it provide one of the most striking landscapes the Okavango has to offer, but it also plays an immensely important role in the sustenance of Delta inhabitants - both animals and humans. This majestic tree grows up to 20m high and has a bare stem which often shows a slight swelling in the middle of the trunk.
 
As the English name "Fan palm" suggests, the leaves are fan-shaped. This is the main distinguishing factor when compared with the only other palm species in the Delta, the Wild Date Palm, which has feather-shaped leaves. Short palm scrub often occurs in dense clumps underneath the tall specimens and is formed by the development of suckers, each of which produces several stems at the base of a parent stem. The tennis ball-sized fruits take two years to mature and up to two years to fall and therefore may be seen on the tree all year round.
 
The cylindrical grey-brown stem has distinctive rings, with scars where leaves had been attached previously. The leaves are large – up to 1,3m in diametre and fan-shaped. Leaves are green when young, yellow-brown when old.
The male flowers are short-lived and produced in short spikes. The female flowers are produced in large, branched sprays.
 

Elephants have a particular fondness for palm nuts and go to considerable lengths to get at them.  Each year, mostly between June and August; the real fan palms are laden with ripe palm nuts.  These nuts provide a much sought after food source for elephants, and as mature palms are very tall, in some instances reaching 20 metres, the elephants have to go to considerable effort to get at them.
 
They do this by placing either an elephant trunk or a forehead against the single main stem of the palm tree, and then, gradually but forcefully, they start to rock the tree trunk, causing it to shake violently.  If the elephant is strong enough to do this well, he is rewarded by a cascade of palm nuts falling from the tree.
 
The fruit of the real fan palm can be described as a hard, ivory-coloured endosperm that is also referred to as 'vegetable ivory' due to the visual likeness of the fruit to real ivory. As a result of the hard texture of these fruits local people regularly carve crafts from it, another traditional use being a potent, intoxicating 'palm wine' that is brewed from the sap harvested from these plants.
 
Smaller elephants lack the strength or weight to knock the palm nuts loose, so they are forced to adopt different strategies.  Some may search around in the grass at the base of the palm tree, looking for fallen nuts that other elephants may have missed.  Another method employed by younger elephants is to follow a big bull that is busy knocking down palm nuts and to try to feed alongside him.
 
Elephants are important dispersal agents for fan palm trees, as their digestive process removes only the fleshy outer part of the palm nuts covering, leaving the seed inside intact and ready to germinate. 
 

The Real Fan Palm is found in the northern parts of Botswana. In the Okavango Delta the species is very common, often forming homogenous island communities which cover the entire island. These trees grow well in areas with a shallow, slightly saline water-table and are therefore prevalent around pans. For this reason they occur on the edges of sand islands.