Ficus Maxima - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

With about 750 species, Ficus (Moraceae) is one of the largest angiosperm genera. (Frodin ranked it as the 31st largest.) Ficus maxima is classified in subgenus Pharmacosycea, section Pharmacosycea, subsection Petenenses. Although recent work suggests that subgenus Pharmacosycea is polyphyletic, section Pharmacosycea appears to be monophyletic and is a sister group to the rest of the genus Ficus.

In 1768, Scottish botanist Philip Miller described Ficus maxima, citing Linnaeus' Hortus Cliffortianus (1738) and Hans Sloane's Catalogus plantarum quæ in insula Jamaica (1696). Sloane's illustration of this plant (published in his 1725 A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica) depicted it with figs borne singly, a characteristic of the Ficus subgenus Pharmacosycea. A closer examination of Sloane's description led Cornelis Berg to conclude that the illustration depicted a member of the subgenus Urostigma, almost certainly F. aurea, and that the illustration of singly borne figs was probably artistic license. Berg located the plant collection upon which Sloane's illustration was based and concluded that Miller's F. maxima was, in fact, F. aurea.

In 1806 the name Ficus radula was applied to material belonging to this species. The description, based on material collected in Venezuela by German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and French botanist Aimé Bonpland, was published in Carl Ludwig Willdenow's fourth edition of Linnaeus' Species Plantarum. This is the oldest description that can unequivocally be applied to this species. In 1847 Danish botanist Frederik Michael Liebmann applied the name Pharmacosycea glaucescens to Mexican material belonging to this species. (It was transferred to the genus Ficus by Dutch botanist Friedrich Anton Wilhelm Miquel in 1867.) In 1849 the name Ficus suffocans was applied to Jamaican material belonging to this species in August Grisebach's Flora of the British West Indian Islands.

In their 1914 Flora of Jamaica, William Fawcett and Alfred Barton Rendle linked Sloane's illustration to F. suffocans. Gordon DeWolf agreed with their conclusion and used the name F. maxima for that species in the 1960 Flora of Panama, supplanting F. radula and F. glaucescens. Since this use has become widespread, Berg proposed that the name Ficus maxima be conserved in the way DeWolf had used it with a new type (Krukoff's 1934 collection from Amazonas, Brazil). This proposal was accepted by the nomenclatural committee in 2005.