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The Ethnobotany 519
Antilles), griffe-chatte (cat’s claw, Dominique, Martinique),
or bois crabbe (crabwood, French Antilles).
People have some wonderfully obtuse ways of
cursing these plants. They may be the arranca pellejo
(skin puller, Venezuela), the beshi di Juana (Jane’s kiss,
Dutch Antilles), bois traînant (dragging tree, Dominique,
Martinique), manca montero (wild impediment,
Cuba), rolón (enveloper, Puerto Rico), or the rolón
escambrón (scaly enveloper, Puerto Rico). To others,
they are avaramo (Brazil) because they resemble the
avará or Arecastrum palm, both notably spiny. They
might be escambrón colorado (big red scale), espino de
mar (sea spine), espino de playa (beach spine, Nicaragua),
or the espinuelo (spiny one, Venezuela). Nevertheless,
everyone’s view after being caught in the claws
and branches of this plant is that it is the diaballe
(devil, Martinique).
Linnaeus ([1753] 1957) captured the bristly nature
of the tree when he called it Mimosa unguis-cati (cat’s
claw mimosa). He knew the plants from the botanical
garden in Uppsala, Sweden, and from Sloane’s
Jamaican herbarium specimen. However, the species
ranges from southern Florida, through the Bahamas,
the West Indies, and Mexico (Tamaulipas and Sinaloa)
south through Central America to Bonaire and
Curaçao, Venezuela, and Guyana. Throughout its
range, everyone has used the plants. The wood is clear
brown, hard, and heavy, and has been used by all who
know it, especially in construction (Morton 1981). The
fruit yields a yellow dye.
The Spaniards apparently thought that the black
seeds resembled the kidneys and the immature white
aril the fat surrounding them. Therefore, by the
Doctrine of Signatures, they concluded that the plant
was good to treat kidney problems. Some think the
Spaniards started using the bark and fruits to treat
kidney problems, but people who preceded them in the
Americas had used the plants long before Europeans
arrived. Since the bark and fruit are rich in tannin and
astringent, they had been used to treat bronchitis,
chronic diarrhea, and hemorrhaging for generations
(Standley 1920 /1926, Roig 1945, Mors et al. 2001).
The bark was also considered tonic and diuretic and
was used to treat fever, and to cure chronic sores.
During early European history the plant in Jamaica
was considered the ‘‘sovereign medicine for the stone
and gravel,’’ and also for the liver and spleen (Standley
1920 /1926). In Curaçao the leaf decoction is taken to
relieve colds (Morton 1981).
The related species, P. keyense (of the Keys), is
similarly rich in tannins, and is used to stop bleeding.
In the Bahama Islands, leafy twigs are chewed or
made into a ‘‘tea’’ to stop bleeding 3 or 4 months into
pregnancy (Morton 1981). That species, easily confused
with P. unguis-cati, is also known as black bead
(Florida, Bahamas), ram’s horn (Bahamas), or aroma
(Bahamas).
People consider the aril edible, but some are sweet
and others are astringent. Perhaps if they are eaten
while still white they would be tastier, but those I have
tried were red, in fully open fruits, and tasted too
much like alum. Seeds are still strung into necklaces
and rosaries as they were in Sloane’s time.
The most famous member of the genus is the
American P. dulce. That species is most often known
under some variation of the Náhuatl name quauhmochitl
(snake jaws), including huamúchil, cuamúchil,
guamúchil, quamochitl, guamuche, camanchil, camonsil,
and camachile. While the plant was first recorded by
Hernández in 1651, the connection between the name
and the plants carried around the world by the
Spanish remained unknown for centuries. Indeed,
the vagaries of where a plant is first collected and
reported as new to science are unpredictable. Pithecellobium
dulce was described in 1795 from the Coast
of Coromandel in India, and for decades people
thought it was native to the Old World. Then it was
discovered that it had been taken there by the Spanish,
first to the Philippines, and then to mainland Asia
(Standley 1920 /1926).
Since no chemical studies have been found for P.
unguis-cati or P. keyense, the best that can be done is
to compare it with congeners. Pithecellobium dulce
contains tannins (Steynberg and Hemingway 1994),
triterpene glycosides (Yoshikawa et al. 1997, Nigam et
al. 1997), triterpene saponins (Sahu and Mahato
1994), and vernolic, malvalic, and sterculic acids
(Hosamani 1995). An Indonesian species contains
flavan-3-ol gallates and proanthocyanidins (Lee et al.
1992). Triterpene saponins are anti-inflammatory
(Sahu and Mahato 1994), triterpenoid glycosides
are antifungal (Khan et al. 1997), and other compounds
are antimicrobial (Ali et al. 2001). Related
species P. saman and P. mangense yield gum exudates
(Leon De Pinto et al. 1995), and P. saman contains
saponins similar to those in P. dulce (Varshney et al.
1985).
Pithecellobium flexicaule produces seeds that are
consumed in northeastern Mexico (Alanis Guzman et
al. 1998) and that have been used in afforestation in
Texas (Vora and Labus 1988). Related species have
uses like P. unguis-cati and maybe similar chemicals.
Sometimes Florida common names are specific:
P. keyense is blackbead and P. unguis-cati is catclaw.
Nowhere else in their range are they distinguished, and
botanists did not even separate the two until
P. keyense was described in 1928. However, a small
gall-wasp (Tanaostigmodes pithecellobiae) uses only P.
keyense and ignores P. unguis-cati (Weekley