Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time

Posted by 1659447091 12/7/2025

Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time(apnews.com)

212 points | 46 commentspage 2

0xedd 12/15/2025|

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_jzlw 12/15/2025||

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_jzlw 12/15/2025||

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paulkrush 12/15/2025||

Odd the other comment(tree) is collapsed? I liked the article and the pictures of the palm trees(plants) are cool.

nidnogg 12/15/2025|

I still need to go see them! Here's hoping I don't procrastinate it too much.

nidnogg 12/15/2025||

It is so hot in Rio de Janeiro right now. We've had nothing but hazy, humid, UV-infested mornings. Can't wait to spend summer somewhere else. I miss the especially mild winter season we have.

MangoToupe 12/15/2025|

An annual, except for every x years where x is greater than 1. Or am I missing something? Why is this interesting? Many plants only bloom once before dying.

Edit: for those of you unfamiliar with the term, an annual only blooms once a year before dying. This is opposed to a perennial.

MomsAVoxell 12/15/2025||

It is of interest because these palms only bloom once in their entire lifetime and then they perish. This has relevance to us all, because it’s literally a once in a lifetime event, and a beautiful one at that. Imagine spending your entire life storing energy for your one and only act of reproduction, and then dying.

Plants are beautiful systems, and for those of us who pay attention there are is lots of beauty in the way they work.

tsimionescu 12/15/2025||

Very common crops do this, like wheat, corn, barley, and all other cereal crops. The special thing here is much more the huge timespan, and the human connection to those that planted these and never had a hope of seeing their most spectacular moment.

tsimionescu 12/15/2025|||

The biggest thing is the spectacle of the flowers themselves, and the reflection on time passing for humans given by such a long time span between when the palm is planted and when this spectacle can be observed.

There's also the spectacle of seeing so many once in 40-80 years blooms happen at once - which the article doesn't touch on, but is an awe-inspiring look into how regular biology can be, despite us thinking of it as messy and random. You'd tend to think that over such a long timespan, the trees would get "de-synchronized". Of course, that wouldn't make sense evolutionarily - they almost certainly need to all bloom at once to have a good chance of reproduction. But getting a biological process to happen 80 years from now on the same day/week for dozens(?) of trees across a park is a marvel in itself.

kuerbel 12/15/2025||

And that's across a park. Let me tell you about gregarious flowering of certain bamboo species, which are synchronised all over the world. They bloom at the same time. Nature is a deeply commited eccentric :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom

Clamchop 12/15/2025|||

The general term for plants that set seed once is monocarp. Most famously agave and bamboo, among plants with cycles longer than two years.

For plants like bamboos, they're interesting because the periods can be quite long, over a hundred years in some cases, so it's simply rare to see them in flower, and due to how they're propagated and how they keep time, you sometimes see a mass worldwide flowering and die off followed by a shortage of that plant.

It's a much rarer reproductive strategy than annual, biennial, or perennial.

ableal 12/15/2025|||

There was some math joke that zero, one and infinity were OK, but the rest of the natural numbers were weird and hard to justify ...

baxtr 12/15/2025|||

> Its most striking, and at the same time most dramatic, feature is that it is a monocarpic species: It only blooms once, at the end of its life, and then it dies.This moment can occur between 40 and 80 years of age, depending on climatic conditions, soil type, and the amount of sunlight the plant has received over the decades. All of the plant's energy is then concentrated into a single reproductive burst.

brazukadev 12/15/2025||

Not annual, only once

tsimionescu 12/15/2025||

In agriculture, annual crops are crops that you have to plant annually. For example corn - the plant dies after producing its fruit, and you have to plant new corn seeds.

In contrast, perrenial crops are those you can harvest every year without having to plant new ones. For example, strawberries don't die after bearing fruit, you can collect fruit over and over from the same plant.