Caryocar brasiliense
| Pequi (Caryocar brasiliense) | |
|---|---|
| |
| Scientific name | Caryocar brasiliense [1] |
| Common names | pequi; pequizeiro; souari nut |
| Genus | Caryocar [1] |
| Family | Caryocaraceae [1] |
| Order | Malpighiales [1] |
| Native range | Bolivia to Brazil and Paraguay [2] |
| Habit | tree about 6-10 m tall, to 15 m in some field studies; slow-growing and semideciduous, with a deep taproot [3] [4] [5] |
| Fruit | spherical drupe about 7 cm across with 1-4 pyrenes; oil-rich orange mesocarp; hard spiny endocarp [3] [5] |
Caryocar brasiliense, commonly called pequi (also pequizeiro and souari nut), is a slow-growing fruit tree of the Cerrado savannas of central South America. GBIF and Plants of the World Online accept Caryocar brasiliense as the species name, native from Bolivia to Brazil and Paraguay in the seasonally dry tropical biome. [1] [2] Its oily, strongly scented fruit is a staple of Brazilian regional cooking, most famously cooked with rice or chicken; the flowers are pollinated by bats. [3] [5]
Description[edit | edit source]
Descriptions give a crooked bole roughly 30-40 cm in diameter, rough scaly bark, and a deep taproot; the tree is semideciduous and slow-growing. [4] Wild trees commonly reach about 8-15 m with a wide, irregular crown, though heights vary with site: a field study recorded trees to 15 m, while an orchard note gives about 8 m. [5] [6] The leaves are trifoliolate, with three small, hairy, leathery leaflets. [3]
Flowers are borne in terminal racemes of 10-30 hermaphroditic flowers, each with a mass of long white stamens, five yellowish-white petals, and a strong scent; they open between 18:00 and 21:00 and senesce about 23 hours later. [5]
The fruit is a spherical drupe about 7 cm across, borne in clusters and ripening from dark purple to dull green. Inside are one to four pyrenes, each holding an oil-rich orange mesocarp around a hard, spiny endocarp. [3] [5]
A second, shrubby subspecies is recognized: Caryocar brasiliense subsp. intermedium, the dwarf pequi, grows only 30-80 cm tall, with or without an apparent stem, and is restricted to rupestrian-field niches instead of the open savanna of the tree form. [7]
Cultivation[edit | edit source]
Soil and water[edit | edit source]
The pequi is native to the seasonally dry tropical biome of the Cerrado and is described as adapted to low-fertility soils, including heavy clays rich in iron and aluminium. [2] [4] Drainage matters more than fertility: the tree form occupies savanna and cerradão soils, while the dwarf subspecies grows on shallow quartzite rupestrian fields. [7] Once established, the deep taproot makes the tree markedly drought tolerant. [4]
Sun and humidity[edit | edit source]
The pequi is a full-sun tree of open savanna rather than a forest understory plant. Cultivation descriptions specify a sunny position and note that dry-season relative humidity in its range can fall to about 13%. [4] Give it open exposure with free airflow; the native habitat is not a humid, sheltered one.
Seasonal changes[edit | edit source]
In its native wet-dry climate, rain falls mainly in the austral summer and the dry season runs through the winter months. Flowering is a dry-season event - July-September in the Kew profile and August-October in the orchard study - with fruits maturing predominantly from November to February as the wet season begins. [3] [6] Cultivation notes give an annual rainfall of about 1,000-1,500 mm with a 3-5 month dry season. [4] Young trees should be irrigated through the dry season until the taproot is established; mature trees tolerate it. [4]
Propagation[edit | edit source]
Seed germination is limited by a double dormancy: the hard, spiny endocarp slows water uptake, and the embryo itself has low growth potential. Germination proceeds when expanding hypocotyl cells crack the endocarp open, and gibberellic acid (GA3) stimulates that expansion in germination-chamber trials. [8] Isolated seeds reached the water content needed for germination in about two days, whereas seeds still enclosed in the endocarp took about twenty days. [8]
Use fresh seed. In a tube-nursery trial, pyrenes stored for 40 days gave 62% emergence while pyrenes stored seven months were almost entirely dead (96.54% dead seeds, 3.45% emergence); dry seeds also drop from near 40% to about 7% water content within about a month of shade storage. [9] [8] In that same trial, GA3 did not significantly increase emergence (contrary to the chamber results above), although a 2,000 mg/L soak produced longer stems and larger leaves, and pre-soaking before sowing was recommended. [9] Practical accounts describe seed that can take a year to germinate, and recommend removing the mesocarp and stratifying the endocarp, or soaking in warm water for 48 hours with the water changed every 12 hours, before sowing in individual containers in sun or light shade; pre-soaked seed may sprout within 30-50 days. [4]
Air layering is the most effective vegetative method so far: in a Distrito Federal trial, survival and callus formation exceeded 85%, with branch diameters of 20-24 mm the most suitable; layers were made in December by ringing a 3 cm bark strip and wrapping it with substrate. [10]
Cuttings are possible but root slowly. Leafy cuttings from young (6-year-old) plants rooted best (22.5% root primordia after 42 days with six leaflets), leafless stakes failed entirely, and pruned apical branches reached 21.2% rooting. [11]
Grafting is the route Embrapa researchers use for domestication; published production projections (roughly 2 t/ha five years after planting, increasing with agronomic input) rest on an industry outlook rather than verified trial data. [12]
Flowering, fruiting, and harvest[edit | edit source]
Flowers open at dusk and are pollinated mainly by nectar-feeding bats; the bats recorded on the flowers in the field study are Glossophaga soricina and Anoura geoffroyi. [5] Moths, hummingbirds, and daytime bees also visit the flowers. Nocturnal bees that collect pollen and nectar do not contribute to fruit set: flowers exposed to bee-only visitation set almost no fruit in an exclusion experiment. [5]
Growth is slow and wild trees begin fruiting very late. In a central Brazil (Distrito Federal) population, a tree with a 7.3 cm stem was estimated at 30-51 years old at first fruiting, and the largest stem measured (43 cm) at 110-153 years; these ages apply to wild, seed-grown trees, not to grafted orchard stock. [13] Whole-stand production was also highly variable between years and tracked annual precipitation: 1,004 fruits/ha (72.9 kg/ha) one year versus 299 fruits/ha (21.7 kg/ha) the next. [13]
Natural fruit set is extremely low. In a Cerrado study, 2.92% of flowers developed into fruit in a degraded area and 2.71% in a preserved area, with high seed abortion (64.5%, possibly from selfed pollen); manual cross-pollination and open pollination set more fruit than self-pollination. [14]
In the shrubby dwarf form, pollination shifts from bats to large diurnal bees near the southern limit of the Cerrado: flowers are smaller, open later, and secrete sucrose-enriched, hexose-dominant nectar that peaks in the early morning. There, bee visits were more than 50 times more frequent than bat visits and increased fruit and seed set, with no difference in genome size between the forms. [15]
Fruits mature from November to February and are harvested after they fall; keeping some fruit on the plant is the sustainable practice, and Brazilian rules prohibit harvesting fruit from the tree before it falls. [6] [12] Outside the native range, flowering and harvest will track the local dry-wet cycle rather than a fixed calendar.
Fruit and uses[edit | edit source]
The edible part is the orange, oily, strongly scented mesocarp, with a sweet but acquired flavor. [4] The internal mesocarp carries 36-66% oil on a dry-weight basis, roughly 60% oleic and 35% palmitic acid, and pulp and kernel oils have been studied as a potential cocoa-butter substitute fat. [12]
The hard endocarp of each pyrene is lined with numerous tiny rigid spines. Biting directly into the pit drives these spicules painfully into the mouth, where they are difficult to remove; the safe way to eat the fruit raw is to scrape the spike-free outer layer of pulp away with the teeth. [3]
Cooking underlies most uses: pequi flavors rice and chicken dishes and is made into jams and a liquor, and the seeds are processed into pequi oil for cooking and cosmetics, with skin products citing moisturising properties. [3]
At least one spineless-endocarp tree has been documented in the wild, at São José do Xingu in Mato Grosso; its endocarp contents were described as fleshier and slightly sweeter, and RAPD markers separated the spineless population from thorny trees. It remains a documented individual, not a released cultivar. [16]
Photos[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ [5] Araujo, F.F. et al. (2020) Nocturnal bees exploit but do not pollinate flowers of a common bat-pollinated tree, Arthropod-Plant Interactions 14:785-797.
- ↑ [6] Phenotypic selection of pequi trees (Caryocar brasiliense) based on fruit production traits over different harvest seasons, Ciência Florestal (2026).
- ↑ [7] Almeida et al. (2021) Spatial characterization of factors inherent in the microendemism of the dwarf pequi tree (Caryocar brasiliense subsp. intermedium), Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências.
- ↑ [8] Sousa, A.M.S. et al. (2017) Structural aspects of germination control in pyrenes of Caryocar brasiliense, Trees 31:887-902.
- ↑ [9] Lacerda, V.R. et al. (2022) Gibberellic Acid Concentrations and Storage of Caryocar brasiliense Seeds Propagated in Tubes, Horticulturae 8(11):1094.
- ↑ [12] Guedes, A.M.M., Antoniassi, R. & de Faria-Machado, A.F. (2017) Pequi: a Brazilian fruit with potential uses for the fat industry, OCL 24(5):D507.
- ↑ [13] Zardo, R.N. & Henriques, R.P.B. (2011) Growth and fruit production of the tree Caryocar brasiliense in the Cerrado of central Brazil, Agroforestry Systems 82:15-23.
- ↑ [14] Roque, S.Q. et al. (2023) Reproductive biology of Caryocar brasiliense (Caryocaraceae) in preserved and degraded Cerrado areas in Brazil, Botany 101(9):357-365.
- ↑ [15] Ballarin, C.S. et al. (2025) From bats to bees: changes in flower anthesis and nectar traits drive a pollination ecotype in dwarf Caryocar brasiliense, Annals of Botany.
- ↑ [16] Londe, L.N. et al. (2010) Characterization of DNA polymorphisms in Caryocar brasiliense in populations with and without thorn at the endocarp by RAPD markers, Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências.
Image credits[edit | edit source]
- Caryocar brasiliense.jpg: Mateus Hidalgo — pequi fruits displayed at a street market in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso; CC BY-SA 2.5. File page. Attribution: Mateus Hidalgo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5.
- Caryocar brasiliense flowers.jpg: João Medeiros — flowering shoot of the pequi at the Jardim Botânico de Brasília, Distrito Federal; CC BY 2.0. File page. Attribution: João Medeiros, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
- Espinhos e amêndoa do pequi.jpg: Andre Koehne — opened pequi fruit exposing the layer of spicules lining the pit and the seed; CC BY-SA 4.0. File page. Attribution: Andre Koehne, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Arroz com pequi.jpg: Andre Koehne — rice cooked with pequi; CC BY 3.0. File page. Attribution: Andre Koehne, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
- Cooked pequi.jpg: Melsj — cooked pequi pulp; CC BY-SA 4.0. File page. Attribution: Melsj, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Fervura do pequi.jpg: Andre Koehne — pequis boiled in a pot for cleaning and sterilization before freezing and later cooking; CC BY-SA 4.0. File page. Attribution: Andre Koehne, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
