Glochidion


Glochidion is a genus of flowering plants, of the family Phyllanthaceae, known as cheese trees or buttonwood in Australia, and leafflower trees in the scientific literature. It comprises about 300 species, distributed from Madagascar to the Pacific Islands. Glochidion species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Aenetus eximia and Endoclita damor. The Nicobarese people have attested to the medicinal properties found in G. calocarpum, saying that its bark and seed are most effective in curing abdominal disorders associated with amoebiasis.
Glochidion are of note in the fields of pollination biology and coevolution because they have a specialized mutualism with moths in the genus Epicephala, in which the moths actively pollinate the flowers—thereby ensuring that the tree may produce viable seeds—but also lay eggs in the flowers' ovaries, where their larvae consume a subset of the developing seeds as nourishment. Other species of Epicephala are pollinators, and in some cases, non-pollinating seed predators, of certain species of plants in the genera Phyllanthus and Breynia, both closely related to Glochidion. This relationship is similar to those between figs and fig wasps and yuccas and yucca moths.
Although the genus Glochidion is native only to the Old World, the East Asian species Glochidion puberum has become naturalized at several locations in the U.S. state of Alabama.
In a 2006 revision of the Phyllanthaceae, it was recommended that Glochidion be subsumed in Phyllanthus; however, new combinations in Phyllanthus for former Glochidion species remain to be published.

Selected species

An incomplete listing: