Herb or shrub to 1.5 m tall;twigs viscid-villous with long simple hairs, armed with yellow or green, acicular spines which in age become flattened, recurved, woody, 2.5 cm long;stems fistulose. Leaves 6-20 cm long, broadly ovate, pin- natifidly lobed, the base truncate to deeply cordate, both sides villous with long, simple, glandular hairs, short-stalked glands and sessile, long-radiate stellae with ascending radii, armed with flattened acicular spines to 3 cm long;petioles 3-7 cm long, sparingly armed. Inflorescence lateral, several-flowered, a short raceme on a short (to 10 mm long) peduncle;pedicels 5-12 mm long, becoming stout and somewhat longer in fruit, viscid-villous to lanate, armed or not. Flowers with the calyx unarmed, deeply lobed, the lobes lanceolate, pubescent outside, 3-6 mm long;corolla violet, showy, exceeding the calyx 2-3 times in bud, 3-4 cm across, lobed about halfway;filaments very short, the anthers 10-12 mm long, linear-oblong and tapering. Fruit orange or yellow, 4-7 mm long, ovoid, often with a 2 cm long, nipple-like apex, and sometimes.bearing one or more nipple-like protrusions at the base;seeds compressed-lenticular, 5-7 mm across, not winged, finely rugose, shiny [Flora of Panama, 2014].
Related invasive species
- Solanum mammosum
Related Farm Practice
- Flora
S. mammosum is an annual or tender perennial plant with poisonous fruit, reported as invasive in Cuba (Oviedo Prieto et al., 2012) as well as in the Philippines (Merrill, 1923), Fiji, Tonga, and parts of Hawaii (Space and Flynn, 2002;PIER, 2014). It is listed as an ‘agricultural weed’, ‘causal alien’, ‘naturalised’ and ‘weed’ in the Global Compendium of Weeds (Randall, 2012). The species is considered native to Central and South America (Acevedo-Rodriguez and Strong, 2012) and possibly the Caribbean (Nee, 1979;PBI Solanum Project, 2014), but has been introduced to the Old World tropics for ornamental use as well as medicinal and food purposes (Lim, 2013), and has potential to escape cultivation (PBI Solanum Project, 2014). It is an annual or short-lived perennial (PBI Solanum Project, 2014) that reproduces by seeds, which may be dispersed by both biotic and abiotic factors, as they are encased in bright yellow-coloured, large, spongy fruit that can float on water (Chiarini and Barboza, 2007;2009). The species is a known weed in Jamaica (Holm et al., 1979), Java (Randall, 2012), and Florida (Medal et al., 2009), and is spontaneous where it occurs in Brazil (Forzza et al., 2010).
Although it is frequently used as an ornamental, S. mammosum is known to be poisonous to mammals (USDA-ARS, 2014) and is included in the FDA Poisonous Plant Database (US-FDA, 2014).