page_title: Casuarina
section_title: Invasive species
hierarchical_section_title: Casuarina / Selected species / Invasive species
caption_attribution_description: English: Casuarina branch over Gold Rock Beach, Grand Bahama
context_page_description: Casuarina is a genus of 17 tree species in the family Casuarinaceae, native to Australia, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia, islands of the western Pacific Ocean, and eastern Africa. It was once treated as the sole genus in the family, but has been split into four genera.
  They are evergreen shrubs and trees growing to 35 m tall. The slender, green to grey-green twigs bearing minute scale-leaves in whorls of 5–20. The apetalous flowers are produced in small catkin-like inflorescences. Most species are dioecious, but a few are monoecious. The fruit is a woody, oval structure superficially resembling a conifer cone, made up of numerous carpels, each containing a single seed with a small wing. The generic name is derived from the Malay word for the cassowary, kasuari, alluding to the similarities between the bird's feathers and the plant's foliage, though the tree is called rhu in current standard Malay.
  Karen Louise Wilson and Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson distinguish the two very closely related genera, Casuarina and Allocasuarina on the basis of:
context_section_description: C. cunninghamiana, C. glauca and C. equisetifolia have become naturalized in several countries, including Argentina, Bermuda, Cuba,  China, Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Mauritius, Kenya, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, the Bahamas, Uruguay and the southern United States; in the United States it was introduced in the early 1900s, and is now considered an invasive species. The species has nearly quadrupled in southern Florida between 1993 and 2005, where it is known as Australian pine.C. equisetifolia is widespread in the Hawaiian Islands where it grows both on the seashore in dry, salty, calcareous soils and up in the mountains in high rainfall areas on volcanic soils. It is also an invasive plant in Bermuda, where it was introduced to replace the Juniperus bermudiana windbreaks killed by a scale insect in the 1940s.
caption: Casuarina on Gold Rock Beach, Grand Bahama
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