Strangler fig

The first thing to learn in a rainforest is a tree that does not start as a tree. A strangler fig — on the Blackall Range most often the Watkins’ fig, Ficus watkinsiana — begins life as a seed wiped from a pigeon’s gut onto a high fork of some other tree. There is a reason for the odd address. The floor of a closed rainforest is one of the darkest places in nature, and a seedling that starts down there faces years of waiting for a gap in the canopy; the fig, by starting high, is standing in the light from the first day. It germinates up in the fork, in a little pocket of trapped leaf litter, and lets down slender roots that feel their way down the host’s trunk toward the soil far below.

The moment those roots touch the ground, the fig changes gear. It thickens, branches, and fuses into a lattice, slowly wrapping its host in a living cage of its own roots that tightens and shades a little more each year, until the original tree — starved of light above and squeezed at the trunk below — dies and rots away inside. What is left is a strangler fig standing as a hollow woven cylinder, a tree-shaped absence where another tree used to be. It is a patient killing, and it can take a hundred years.

For all the drama, the fig cannot manage any of it alone. It needs an animal to place its seed in the first place, because a fig seed that falls to the ground has begun in the wrong place entirely; and it needs its own particular wasp, because each species of fig is pollinated by one species of tiny wasp and no other, in a contract so tight that neither can breed without the other. What the forest gets back for hosting so ruthless a tenant is a larder. A big fig in fruit feeds fruit-doves, topknot pigeons, bowerbirds and flying-foxes all at once, and because different figs bear at different times, a forest with its figs intact almost always has something in fruit. That is why a tree that begins by killing another is counted among the most valuable in the forest: it is the one that keeps the rest of it fed.