An Online Checklist of Banana CultivarsRhiannon Crichton, Anne Vezina & Inge Van den Bergh18 August 2014, ProMusa symposium, IHC, Brisbane

A multitude of names for banana cultivars…

…because of their morphological diversity & the socio-linguistic diversity of the people naming them

Synonyms

The cultivar ‘Poovan’ (Mysore AAB) is cited as having at least 27 synonyms in India (Singh et al., 2002).

‘Rasthali’ ‘Sugandam’ ‘Ladiyachampa’

Homonyms

The name ‘Lady’s Finger’ is used as a homonym for, e.g.:

• a Pome AAB cultivar in India;

• a Muraru AA cultivar in Eastern Africa;

• a Sucrier AA cultivar in Hawaii.

‘Lady’s Finger’ ‘Lady’s Finger’ ‘Lady’s Finger’

A “major problem in banana research”*

Abundance & distribution?

*De Langhe, 1990

Checklists for regions and/or subgroups exist

Introducing the Online Checklist of Banana Cultivars

Online Checklist of Banana Cultivars

www.promusa.org/Banana+cultivar+checklist

Content as of 08 August 2014*

• 6965 entries

• 4911 local names

• 1940 cultivars

• 39 subgroups

• 15 (genome) groups

• 93 locations

• 38 references

*The content is far from exhaustive and should therefore not be considered definitive!

Current uses

Insights into the meanings of local names

…lady’s fingers, fingers of a princess, crocodile’s fingers banana, fingers of a gorilla, monkeys fingers, like nose of a flying fox, like head of a dog, bull horn, elephant’s tusks, like fish teeth, goat, sheep, buffalo, striped squirrel, elephant’s tail, look up at the sun, banana of the dead, spirit of the phantoms, white, copper, gold, green, red, purplish red, black, night black, excrements, hernia, foot of a leper, to stretch hands begging, breasts, pregnant banana, a mother has no heart, broken heart, smile, banana from Heaven, milk from Heaven, angel’s food banana, spread with honey, golden banana that the birds told humans they could eat…

Current limitations

The checklist is only as reliable as the content it contains. Some recurring issues:

• the unintentional creation of synonyms (Local names) through spelling mistakes and ambiguous punctuation;

• a lack of cross-referencing of work on the banana cultivars in a geographic region or subgroup to earlier work;

• the compilation of checklists that rely on secondary sources of information.

Further ongoing issues

The Online Checklist of Banana Cultivars will never be able to provide a definitive account of cultivar abundance and distribution until the following issues are resolved:

description – achieving the comprehensive morpho-taxonomic description of banana cultivars;

nomenclature – arriving at an internationally accepted name for each banana cultivar name status field;

classification – elucidating a well-defined classification system for banana cultivars classification status field.

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions

"Since difficulties of nomenclature and classification cause much confusion in the literature of this group [banana cultivars], all names employed in the present study are as non-committal as possible. …in the present state of knowledge it seems better to use only varietal names for cultivated clones. Even with these caution is necessary, and little reliance can be placed on apparent or reported synonymy, because the group is particularly difficult to study systematically on any but living material”.

Cheesman (1932)

Next steps

We hope the Online Checklist of Banana Cultivars will be a valuable resource for the banana community as a:

• source of information on the cultivars;

• tool to monitor progress towards arriving at: • internationally accepted cultivar names;• a well-defined classification system.

We will continue to update the checklist and request submissions of information and feedback from members of the community.

The suggested citation for the checklist is: Online Checklist of Banana Cultivars. 2013. http://www.promusa.org/Banana+cultivar+checklist. (accessed DD/MM/YYYY).

www.bioversityinternational.org

Thank you

www.promusa.org/Banana+cultivar+checklist

Many images sourced from Musarama: www.musarama.org