Coontie Research Paper

Coontie is a seed plant (gymnosperm). It doesn’t produce any type of flowers or fruits, it just produces plain old seeds. It belongs to the phylum cycadophyta (cycads) and is the only cycad native to Florida. It is known to be a “living fossil”. Also they are dioecious, meaning that they have separate male and female plants and produce either male or female cones. The sex of young plants can not be determined until the cones become mature plants. Slender male cones are about three to seven inches tall and produce pollen. Upright brown female cones are about six inches tall and are covered with velvety fuzz. Coonties kind of look like a medium shrub-like herb or a fern. It forms this group of suckers that slowly grow into mounds that are around five to

They grow at a slow rate in places that are dry and well-drained making them tough, drought resistant and easy to maintain. They also grow in sandy pinelands and hammocks as well. They can take years to develop into well-established large plants. It is also difficult to move coontie from place to place because of its long tap roots and the operation is usually fails. It is illegal removing these plants from the wild. Coontie can tolerate some salt drift from the sea and can be planted near, but not directly on the beach. They can take full sun to full shade which is pretty impressive. They don’t really need that much water to survive. They don’t really have that many pests as well, they just have the Red Florida Scale and the mealy bug. Mockingbirds, blue jays, and many other birds as well as insects and small mammals eat the seeds of the coontie as a food source while caterpillars eat the plant itself. Back in the day, Floridians would actually use coontie as a food source even though it was and probably still is naturally poisonous to them to this day. The seed and all other parts of the plant are poisonous if they are