Ficus schwarzii

Koord.

Moraceae Edible: Fruit 2 iNaturalist observations

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 small tree. It grows 17 m tall. The stems have white sap. The leaves are alternate and simple. The fruit are 17 mm across. They are round and golden brown. They are in dense clusters along the stem.

Edible Uses

Fruit. The golden-brown, globose fruits are around 17mm in diameter. They are produced in dense clusters along the stems.

Medicinal Uses

The latex is applied externally as a treatment for ringworm.

Distribution

It is a tropical plant. It grows in forests up to 1,000 m above sea level. It grows along rivers and on hillsides. It can be on sandy or clay soils and also on limestone.

Where It Grows

Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, 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.