The heliconia family
Heliconiaceae is a single genus of large tropical plants built almost entirely around hummingbirds. The bracts everybody buys them for are a bird feeder, a rain gauge and a small self contained pond, all at once.
one genus, Heliconia
roughly 190 species
Tropical America, with a small outpost in the western Pacific
Everything in this guide that belongs to Heliconiaceae
The whole family is one genus, and the name is a joke about its relatives. Bananas carry the genus name Musa, which Linnaeus and his contemporaries happily read as a reference to the Muses of Greek myth. This plant, being the bananas' close neighbor, was named for Mount Helicon, the mountain the Muses lived on. The family's whole identity is a pun about who its cousins are.
Structurally it is a banana without the fruit: no woody trunk, but a column of tightly rolled leaf bases carrying big paddle leaves that split along the veins in wind.
The flowering head comes in two architectures and they read completely differently. Erect forms hold the bracts up in a stiff zigzag, one above the other in a flat plane, which is the shape sold as lobster claw. Pendent forms hang the whole thing straight down from the top of the plant, sometimes for several feet, in ranks of bracts like a rope of flags.
Heliconias are pollinated by hummingbirds and almost nothing else, and the relationship is tight enough to have shaped both sides. The true flowers sit down inside the bracts as narrow curved tubes holding a great deal of nectar, reachable only by a bill of the right length and the right curve.
Hermit hummingbirds, with long strongly decurved bills, work the species with strongly curved flowers. Straighter billed species work the straighter ones. The fit is exact enough that a bird visiting the wrong species gets very little for the trouble.
The clearest case is in the Caribbean, where male and female purple throated caribs have noticeably different bills: the female's is longer and more curved than the male's. The two sexes feed at two different heliconia species, each matching the shape of its own bill. They are the same bird, living off different plants, and the flowers are a large part of why they stopped looking alike.
Each bract is a stiff waterproof cup held at an angle, and in the wet tropics it fills. That water is not a nuisance to the plant; it is the point. It keeps the developing flowers humid, it drowns some insects that would otherwise chew them, and it is topped up by every shower.
What lives in it is the interesting part. A bract holding a few spoonfuls of rainwater is a complete miniature habitat, and biologists have a word for that kind of plant held pool. Mosquito and midge larvae breed in them, damselflies lay in them, specialized beetles and flies spend their entire larval lives in them, and there are small organisms known from heliconia bracts and effectively nowhere else. A single plant can be carrying dozens of these pools at once.
It is also why the stems arrive in a shop full of water, and why somebody who does not know to tip them out gets a smell they cannot locate.
The leaves get used too, and by something that has to modify them first. Several small tropical bats are tent makers: they land on the underside of a large leaf and bite through the side veins in a line either side of the midrib, so that the two halves of the leaf collapse downward into an inverted V.
The bat then roosts inside its own tent, hanging from the intact midrib, sheltered from rain and hidden from anything looking down. A group will share one. Heliconia leaves, being big, broad and held out flat, are among the preferred materials, and in parts of Central America you can find the folded leaves and know what made them.
A tent lasts a few weeks before the leaf gives out, so the bats build constantly. It is one of the very few examples of a mammal other than a human making a shelter out of a plant by cutting it to shape.