Heliconia caribaeaLam.

lobsterclaw

WFO wfo-0000437264 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Heliconia caribaea, photographed by Tommy Andriollo
fig. a Tommy Andriollo, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-07 / obs. 195625539
Heliconia caribaea, photographed by Dan Schofield
fig. b Dan Schofield, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185238536
Heliconia caribaea, photographed by Elliot Greiner
fig. c Elliot Greiner, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181587164
Heliconia caribaea, photographed by Michael Bakker Paiva
fig. d Michael Bakker Paiva, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173200760
Heliconia caribaea, photographed by Michael Bakker Paiva
fig. e Michael Bakker Paiva, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173158501
Heliconia caribaea, photographed by Daniel Cahen
fig. f Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 60875815
Heliconia caribaea, photographed by J. L. Gómez-Hechavarría
fig. g J. L. Gómez-Hechavarría, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 117990962
Heliconia caribaea, photographed by obi-one
fig. h obi-one, CC0 1.0 / obs. 6841376

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Regions where Heliconia caribaea is native: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Leeward Is., Puerto Rico, Windward Is. CubaDominican RepublicHaitiJamaicaPuerto Rico Leeward Is.Windward Is.
Native distribution of Heliconia caribaea, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Cuba CUB SOUTHERN AMERICA
Dominican Republic DOM
Haiti HAI
Jamaica JAM
Leeward Is. LEE
Puerto Rico PUE
Windward Is. WIN

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 42 in flower of 42 examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Heliconia caribaea observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 42 of 42 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 574 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 17.3 °C 20.9 °C 23.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.0 °C 27.0 °C 29.7 °C
Annual rainfall 1,186 mm 2,446 mm 3,194 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 160 mm 319 mm 508 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 574 research-grade observations of Heliconia caribaea that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 7 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Bihai borinquena (Griggs) Griggs
  • Bihai borinquena var. coccinea Griggs & Harris
  • Bihai conferta Kuntze
  • Bihai luteofusca (Jacq.) Kuntze
  • Heliconia borinquena Griggs
  • Heliconia conferta Petersen
  • Heliconia luteofusca Jacq.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.