Ficus geocharis

Corner

Moraceae Edible: Fruit, Leaves 1 iNaturalist observations

iNaturalist· cc-by-nc

gbif· cc0

President and Fellows of Harvard College

Description

A fig. It is a small tree. It grows 17 m tall. The leaves are alternate and simple. They are hairy underneath. The base of the leaves is unequal. There are teeth along the edge. The fruit are dark red irregular shaped. They are crusty fruit growing on the stem. These creeping stems near the ground can be several metres long. The fruit are 1.5 cm across.

Edible Uses

The young leaves can be used as vegetable. Fruit. The red-purple, globose fruits are covered with green scales; they are around 15mm in diameter. The fruits are placed along ground creeping stems that can be several meters long.

Distribution

A tropical plant. It grows in secondary forest up to 1,200 m above sea level. They are usually along streams. They can grow on sandy soils. It grows in Borneo.

Where It Grows

Asia, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, SE Asia,

Cultivation

Often found in the wild on sandy soils. 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.