Ficus midotis

Corner

Moraceae Edible: Fruit

gbif· cc0

President and Fellows of Harvard College

gbif· cc0

President and Fellows of Harvard College

gbif· cc0

President and Fellows of Harvard College

Description

A fig. It is a shrub or strangler fig. It grows up to 8 m tall. The stem has white sap. The leaves are alternate and simple. They can be unequal at the base. The fruit are 6 mm across. They can be yellow, orange, red or purple. They are round. The figs are along the twigs.

Edible Uses

The fruit are eaten.

Distribution

It is a tropical plant. It grows in Borneo.

Where It Grows

Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, SE Asia,

Cultivation

Fig trees have a unique form of fertilization, each species relying on a single, highly specialized species of wasp that is itself totaly dependant upon that fig species in order to breed. The trees produce three types of flower; male, a long-styled female and a short-styled female flower, often called the gall flower. All three types of flower are contained within the structure we usually think of as the fruit. The female fig wasp enters a fig and lays its eggs on the short styled female flowers while pollinating the long styled female flowers. Wingless male fig wasps emerge first, inseminate the emerging females and then bore exit tunnels out of the fig for the winged females. Females emerge, collect pollen from the male flowers and fly off in search of figs whose female flowers are receptive. In order to support a population of its pollinator, individuals of a Ficus spp. must flower asynchronously. A population must exceed a critical minimum size to ensure that at any time of the year at least some plants have overlap of emmission and reception of fig wasps. Without this temporal overlap the short-lived pollinator wasps will go locally extinct.