Hollow Trees

Here is a little plant that starts it's life high up in the tree tops, where it can find more light than the dark understory of the rainforest. As it grows though, soon getting enough water becomes limiting factor, and the plant will drop a shoot to the ground.

Matt Ogburn, a graduate student in Erika Edwards' lab at Brown University, describes this little plant, the strangler fig, and explains how it eventually grows to take over the whole host tree and strangle it to death.

Artwork and editing by Sophia Tintori. Original score by Amil Byleckie. Thanks to Jo Deryfor use of her studio. Video released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

--Sophia Tintori

1 Comment

May 23, 2011 | 04:12 PM

Posted By: Katie Kline

This is great! You might be interested in a recent post on strangler figs and wasps (coevolution) at http://www.esa.org/esablog/field/the-story-of-the-fig-and-its-wasp/.

Digg
MySpace
Google+
StumbleUpon

Hollow Trees

share

Email your Friend