Ficus prolixa

What to Eat

Edible parts: Sap chewed, Fruit

The fruits are cooked and eaten with coconut sap, and the sap is chewed.

Where to Find It

A tropical plant. In Samoa it grows between 20 to 400 m above sea level.

American Samoa, Fiji, Kiribati, Mariana Islands, Marquesas, Micronesia, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Pacific, Pohnpei, Rotuma, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Yap,

How to Identify

A strangler fig. A large tree with a spreading crown. It grows 20 m high. It has milky sap. It develops hanging roots which form several large trunks. The bark is mottled and grey-brown. The bark is green underneath. The leaves are simple and alternate. The blade is narrowly oval and 5-11 cm long. It is rounded at the base. It narrows at the tip. The leaf is dark glossy green on the upper surface and lighter underneath. The mid vein is yellow. The side veins form loops. The leaf stalk is 1.3-2.3 cm long. The flowers are in a fig receptacle. This fruit like structure has broad bracts that remain on the base. This fruiting structure is 5-7 mm across. It is green to yellow. It has many small seeds.

How to Grow

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.

Medicinal Uses

The latex has been used as an abortifacient. This can be very dangerous. Local curers sometimes use the sticky sap in medicinal preparations designed to stop the bleeding of external or internal injuries.

Other Uses

A fine-grade tapa cloth is made from the bark of the young stems and aerial roots. The aerial roots are the source of a fibre that is made into cordage. The latex is used for caulking boats and waterproofing. The wood, including the aerial roots, is used locally in light construction, tool making etc. The wood is used for fuel. This species seems to be one of the only species capable of long-term colonization of residual pinnacles in strip-mined areas, and could become dominant in the disclimax vegetation.

Notes

There are about 800-1000 Ficus species. They are mostly in the tropics. There are 120 Ficus species in tropical America.

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