The common assumption was that it had been planted beside a building used by local rulers, the Burra Bungalow, whose architecture suggested that it dated from the late Mughal–early British period, roughly 300 to 350 years ago. The tree was thought to have been planted there to provide shade, creating a place where the rulers could meet local people without inviting large crowds into their home.

Recent research by Trina Bose, Mayank Shekhar, Akhilesh Kumar Yadav and colleagues at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, in Lucknow, has turned that idea on its head. Published in April 2026 in the journal Quaternary Research, the study used radiocarbon dating to establish a minimum age of around 700 years for the tree — making it the oldest accurately dated banyan (Ficus benghalensis) in the world.

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Bose’s team has therefore shown that the tree was already standing centuries before the building was constructed. She told me she thinks it more likely the banyan already served as a meeting place between local rulers and commoners, and that the rulers eventually decided to build nearby for their own comfort and shelter from the elements.

It is only the beginning of what Bose wants to discover by determining the true age of India’s myth-cloaked heritage trees. It is also sensitive work, because science can sometimes challenge the stories that have grown up around these trees.

When counting rings doesn’t work

Few of the world’s 900-plus species of fig trees are as spectacular as banyans. They expand outwards as they grow, sending down aerial roots from their branches that thicken into pillar-like secondary trunks. The great scale of some specimens speaks to their antiquity. But how old they are is often unknown.

Across India and elsewhere, banyan trees have played significant roles in culture and religion. Their ages may be preserved in oral traditions, folklore or historical records, but those accounts can be difficult to verify.

In temperate zones, working out the age of a tree can often be straightforward. Researchers take a core from its trunk and count the annual growth rings. But many tropical trees do not produce distinct annual rings, making conventional dendrochronology difficult or impossible.

Bose and her colleagues have shown that this is the case for Ficus benghalensis. So when the Bihar Forest Department asked Bose to date the Munger banyan, her team had to find another way. The basic idea, Bose told me, “is actually pretty simple — we used what we already knew”.

Reading the oldest wood

What Bose’s team knew is that the oldest wood formed during a tree’s secondary growth is found in the central pith. They also knew that when a plant cell forms, it produces alpha-cellulose, a stable structural component of its cell wall.

So rather than trying to count tree rings that weren’t there, they targeted the oldest wood they could access. Using corers 5-10 millimetres in diameter, they took samples of what they believed was a primary branch and from an exposed secondary trunk. They then located the pith, extracted alpha-cellulose and subjected it to high-precision radiocarbon dating to estimate its age.

The dates revealed a remarkable history. The branch originated around 1342, while the pillar root reached the ground around 1585. This shows that these parts of the banyan were already centuries old before the Burra Bungalow was built. But the data does not tell us when the tree itself began growing.

That’s because Bose’s team was unable to access the banyan’s original trunk. It is so thoroughly surrounded by prop roots that the researchers could not be sure where its centre was. They were not even sure that the trunk still exists.

This is one of the peculiarities of banyans. Over time, the aerial roots that their branches send down can encase the original trunk, which may eventually disappear altogether. For Bose, it would have been both technically difficult and ethically questionable to try to find it.

“How would you guess where is the centre?” she says. “That is the problem. We don’t even know if the primary trunk is there. We can go and drill anywhere, but I don’t think that is good to do to a heritage tree.”

With no guarantee of reaching the oldest wood, Bose did not think drilling into that part of the tree was justified. While the researchers showed that the banyan is at least seven centuries old, an even older part of the tree remains hidden, or may no longer exist.

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When science changes the story

The Munger banyan is an example of how dating trees can alter our understanding of human history.

Rather than being planted beside the building used by local rulers, the tree was already there. Its size and prominence may have made the spot a natural meeting place long before the building was constructed. The research also suggests that the banyan may be a surviving remnant of the natural forest that once covered the area.

That is one of the reasons Bose believes dating ancient trees could be so valuable. Historical records often tell us about rulers, battles and buildings while saying much less about forests, agriculture and climate. A tree can provide a different kind of record that is rooted in the landscape itself.

By providing a method for dating tropical trees that lack annual growth rings, Bose’s research could make it easier to identify and protect trees that are important both culturally and ecologically. But there is also a potentially uncomfortable aspect to this research, as scientific dating can contradict stories that communities have told for generations. Bose is particularly conscious of this because many of the trees she studies — or would like to study — grow in places where people live, and have deep cultural or religious significance.

One example is Thimmamma Marrimanu, a famous banyan in Andhra Pradesh. According to local tradition, it originated in 1434, growing up from the place where a woman died after throwing herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre. The banyan holds the world record for the largest canopy on a living tree, covering an area equivalent to three football pitches.

What if scientific dating showed it to be much younger — or much older?

Bose says scientific data and local lore need not compete. Accurately dating the tree would not mean that a woman had not died there, nor that the banyan had not grown on that very spot. Perhaps the woman lived at a different time and the remembered date has shifted over generations, she says.

Bose suspects that if a tree believed to be 500 years old turned out to be 1,000 years old, local people might be delighted rather than disappointed. The scientific result could become another chapter in the tree’s story, rather than the end of it.

Trees waiting to be dated

Bose and her colleagues are now applying their approach more widely. They are working on several banyans in her home state of Uttar Pradesh, as well as two other fig species. There are also some famous trees that Bose would particularly like to date.

They include Thimmamma Marrimanu in Andhra Pradesh and the enormous banyan at the Indian Botanical Garden at Howrah. Bose is also interested in the living bridges made from the roots of Ficus elastica fig trees in Northeast India — some of which are said to be hundreds of years old.

Then there is Kabir Vad, an immense banyan in Gujarat that is one of India’s most celebrated trees. It is associated with the poet-sant Kabir, and is said to have sprung up around 550 years ago when he discarded a twig he had used as a toothbrush. But there is another, far older claim about the tree.

It is reputed to be the same banyan that Alexander the Great encountered 2,300 years ago. Accurately dating the tree could at least settle one part of the mystery: whether this enormous banyan could possibly be the same tree described by Alexander’s companions.

“Why only limit to India? — I want to go beyond,” Bose told me. If her method works across different tropical fig species, there could be ancient trees all over South Asia — and further afield — whose histories are waiting to be revealed.

While the Munger banyan now holds the record for the world’s oldest accurately dated banyan — and the oldest dated member of any fig species in India — I have a feeling its record will not stand.

“I might give you a better surprise next year,” Bose told me. “Let’s see what I can show you next year.”

Thanks for reading. For more astounding stories about the ecological and cultural importance of fig trees, see the Planet Ficus archive. To support my work please consider subscribing or sharing this post.

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In a cave on one side lurked Scylla, a fearsome sea monster with six heads on long necks. Only recently, her powerful jaws had snatched six of Odysseus’s companions and devoured them alive. On the other side — closer, and even more terrifying — dwelt Charybdis, an unseen horror beneath the waves. Three times each day, its vast maw swallowed the sea, creating a roaring whirlpool before spewing the water back out again. Leaning out over the maelstrom grew a wild fig tree, its roots gripping a bare, wave-battered rock.

This scene, first narrated nearly three millennia ago, marks the lowest point of Greek poet Homer’s Odyssey.

For the hero, all hope seemed lost. But as Charybdis sucked in and swallowed his crude raft, Odysseus leapt upward and seized hold of the fig tree’s trunk. Homer says he clung to it “like a bat” as the sea churned beneath him. When the whirlpool spat out his raft, Odysseus dropped into the water, recovered it, and paddled desperately away towards safety.

The fig tree appears for only a few lines in Homer’s epic. Yet without it, The Odyssey would end here. The greatest journey in Western literature, and its archetypal hero, are saved by a tree.

Why a fig?

Homer could have chosen any tree. Why did he choose a wild fig? Catalin Anghelina of the Department of History, Political Science, Languages and Cultures at Otterbein University argues that this choice was deliberate. Unlike the olive tree — which repeatedly symbolizes the goddess Athena’s protective presence throughout The Odyssey — the fig tree appears precisely at the moment when the goddess cannot intervene.

Odysseus is being punished directly by the supreme deity Zeus, and even Athena is powerless to shield him. The fig tree therefore marks the one moment in the story when Odysseus must survive without divine assistance.

Han Tran, a senior lecturer in classics at the University of Miami, reaches a complementary conclusion. “This fig tree belongs to a natural world over which mortals are not masters,” she writes. Thriving on “the barren surface of a salt-encrusted rock”, where it is lashed by storms, the tree becomes an expression of nature’s irrepressible vitality. Tran likens it to Gaia, the primordial force of life itself, endlessly creating even under the harshest conditions.

Roots of resilience

The fig in Homer’s story belongs to a lineage of trees whose extraordinary ability to endure hostile environments has shaped landscapes for millions of years. The tree would have been a Ficus carica, a species widely domesticated but also growing wild throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike most fruit trees, fig trees readily colonize cliffs, rocky slopes and the walls of abandoned buildings.

Their seeds germinate in tiny cracks where almost nothing else can grow. Their roots penetrate deep in rock, anchoring the tree while gradually widening the fissures. They are also among the fruit trees most tolerant of saline conditions. Tran describes Homer’s sea-sprayed tree as improbable, but such a tree is by no means impossible.

Ficus carica’s tropical relatives are equally adept at thriving in extreme conditions. In Indonesia, fig trees soon germinated in the bare lava left behind by the eruption of Krakatau in 1883. Fig roots can also reach astonishing depths in search of water. In South Africa, the roots of a Ficus natalensis tree hold a Guinness World Record for penetrating 120 metres below ground.

More than a symbol

Ancient audiences would have recognized the symbolic significance of the tree. Today, the scene invites another reading as well.

Homer was not writing about climate change. But his image of a lone survivor clinging to a tree while the forces of nature rage around him feels strikingly contemporary. As climate change threatens more communities with floods, fires, storms and landslides, the question of what allows people — and landscapes — to endure becomes ever more urgent.

The fig tree reminds us that, even in times of crisis, nature can sometimes provide the means of survival. But what Homer could never have imagined is just how remarkable fig trees really are.

What Homer couldn’t have known

Fig trees evolved when giant dinosaurs still walked the Earth. Over the tens of millions of years since then, they have diversified into more than 900 species and have spread across a great swathe of the planet. In tropical and subtropical regions, they are keystone species, producing figs year-round and sustaining wildlife through periods of fruit scarcity. No other trees feed so many species, at so many times of year.

Across the world, people are increasingly turning to fig trees when landscapes are damaged or unstable. Their unusual combination of deep roots, drought tolerance, rapid growth and ability to attract wildlife make them pioneers of ecological recovery.

Scientists in Australia and Thailand have used fig trees to accelerate forest regeneration by attracting seed-dispersing birds and mammals. In northeast India, communities have learned to train the roots of Ficus elastica trees into meshes that stabilise steep land prone to landslides and even build living bridges that connect villages in remote areas. In the drylands of Ethiopia, Ficus thonningii trees boost the resilience of farmers during drought conditions, providing shade for crops and fodder for livestock that is more nutritious than commercial feeds. And in Malaysian Borneo, projects are planting fig trees on old oil palms to connect patches of forest and boost food supplies for endangered wildlife.

In the face of the challenges of climate change, The Odyssey’s fig tree is a reminder that we cannot rely on divine intervention, that solving the problem is ultimately our responsibility — but also that nature can be one of our greatest allies.

Homeward bound

The hero’s homecoming — or nostos — is one of the great themes of The Odyssey. It means more than Odysseus simply returning to his home on the island of Ithaca. It is about recovering identity, family, belonging and one’s proper place in the world after prolonged hardship.

Our home is not merely the place where we happen to live, but the living Earth itself. The word “ecology” derives from the Greek oikos — meaning home. If our own nostos is still ahead of us, then it is not a journey back to a single place. It is the work of restoring the living systems that make every home possible, and repairing the damaged relationship between humanity and the rest of life on Earth.

The fig tree Homer placed above the whirlpool tells us that even his greatest hero depended for survival on the living world. Odysseus would never have reached his home without the tree that was there when he needed it.

Our own journey home will require us to both protect existing trees and plant new ones where they are needed most. Whether there will still be such trees to cling to will depend on the choices we make long before we reach our own whirlpools.

Postscript 1: Scylla and Charybdis were born of ancient imagination, but today both names belong to real sea creatures. In 1833, zoologist Wilhem de Haan named two groups of Indo-Pacific crabs Scylla and Charybdis. Some are invasive species. Charybdis longicollis has reached the Mediterranean Sea, where it is a predator of local molluscs, fish and crustaceans. Research published in 2025 showed that climate change will greatly expand the area of suitable habitat for this species — including waters around Ithaca, the island Odysseus spent a decade trying to reach.

Postscript 2: Being caught ‘between Scylla and Charybdis’ entered the English language as a precursor to later phrases featuring ‘a rock and a hard place’, or ‘the devil and the deep blue sea’ — meaning the state in which every option is dire. The image it brings to my mind is that of Tammy Holmes and her five grandchildren, who fled into the sea to escape a wall of wildfire that engulfed the town of Dunally in Tasmania, Australia in 2013. Such are the decisions we will increasingly face until we get a grip on climate change and the carbon emissions that cause it — to run from flames and risk drowning in rising seas.

Postscript 3: I saw Christopher Nolan’s movie The Odyssey the day after publishing this and was surprised that he did not include the scene I describe here, which among the story’s most pivotal moments — the point where all is lost and death seems certain for Odysseus. It makes me all the more pleased to have told the story here.

Thanks for reading. For more astounding stories about the ecological and cultural importance of fig trees, see the Planet Ficus archive. To support my work please consider subscribing or sharing this post.

After hundreds of years of sustaining life all around it, providing shade for prayers and sacrifices, and standing as a sacred symbol for generations, the demise of such a giant is more than a local tragedy. In the Kikuyu culture of Kenya, it is a portentous event.

Mugumo trees (Ficus thonningii) are magnificent to behold. Some grow upwards from the soil, while others are strangler figs that grow from seeds that fall on other trees. Their branches send down aerial roots that envelop everything they touch. In time, these roots fuse into a solid mass that even an elephant would struggle to topple.

To birds, monkeys and fruit bats, mugumo trees offer a lifeline. Their figs feed these animals through times of fruit scarcity, sustaining the creatures that disperse the seeds of many more tree species.

To Kikuyu people, these trees symbolize strength, endurance and spiritual power. Once consecrated as shrines, they serve believers as conduits to their god, Ngai. As such, they must never be cut.

Taboos against felling fig trees are not unique to Kenya. Across Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas, many cultures have developed similar prohibitions — often accompanied by stories of misfortune, or worse, befalling those who break them.

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According to a 2017 media report, a Kenyan man’s brown skin turned white after he pruned a sacred fig tree in 1972. Contrast that with the fate of some Kikuyu converts to Christianity who — according to the missionary Costanzo Cagnolo, writing in 1933 — were killed for chopping down a mugumo for firewood.

With such protections in place, sacred mugumos could grow into giants. The very notion of one falling became wrapped up in faith.

Perhaps the most famous of Kenya’s fallen fig trees was one that grew in the town of Thika — until 1963, that is. Its downfall had been foretold more than a century earlier. In the late 1800s, a Kikuyu seer called Cege wa Kibiru prophesied the arrival of pale-skinned people carrying ‘fire sticks’ — their guns. He foresaw an iron snake that would swallow people and vomit them out again — the train. And he predicted that when the giant mugumo in Thika fell, his people would be free.

When representatives of the British colonial government heard this story, they reinforced the tree with a metal rail. It did not help. Part of the tree fell in May 1963. A month later Kenya gained internal self-rule.

The rest of the tree fell six months later. Within a month — on 12 December —Kenya became independent, with Jomo Kenyatta its first Prime Minister. One of Kenyatta’s first acts as leader of the new nation was to plant a mugumo fig tree where the British Union Flag had once flown.

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The connection between falling fig trees and political change did not end there. People have linked the collapse of sacred mugumos with the assassination of politician JM Kariuki in 1975, the death of Kenyatta in 1978, and the election victories of Mwai Kibaki in 2002 and Kenyatta’s son Uhuru in 2013. Each fallen tree was read as a sign.

By 2017 — another election year — Kenya’s mugumos were under intense scrutiny. Dozens of media reports pondered the significance of an apparent increase in falling mugumos. When one sacred tree cracked and began leaning towards people’s houses in Kiambu County, a village elder warned that such things happen when society commits a sin: “God is angry and people need to seek forgiveness.”

Three days earlier, another giant mugumo had fallen in Nyeri County. Some people said it symbolized the death of the county governor. Others blamed a snake that had made its home among the tree’s roots and defiled the holy place.

Kikuyu elders gathered at the fallen tree. They chanted, sacrificed lambs and poured libations of traditional beer sweetened with honey to cleanse the shrine. When asked what the mugumo’s demise meant, an elder called Kariuki Kabue said there was nothing to fear and that the purpose of the ceremony was to “say goodbye to this tree”.

On this occasion, it was simply a matter of old age. Even sacred giants eventually fall.

Mugumo trees have played many other curious roles in Kenya — wartime lookout post, clandestine post office and symbol of resistance. In my book Gods, Wasps and Stranglers, they star alongside a queen, a Nobel laureate and the most wanted man in the British Empire. Their sacred status has a history of its own. Missionaries and their converts sometimes viewed these trees as obstacles to be overcome rather than shrines to be revered. I wrote about that story here.

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Mackay already knew that figs feed more bird species than any other fruit. His research, published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation in 2018, would show that fig trees are disproportionately important for insect-eaters too. It added to growing evidence that fig trees are titans of biodiversity with important roles to play in conservation.

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What makes fig trees so crucial is their ancient relationship with tiny wasps. The trees depend on the wasps to pollinate their flowers, while the wasps can only breed and lay eggs inside their partner’s figs. Thanks to this partnership, figs are available year-round and have been called ‘keystone’ resources for fruit eaters.

Mackay’s study was the first to show that fig-wasps emerging from figs before they ripen are also valuable year-round resources for a diverse variety of insect-eating birds.

Altogether, Mackay recorded 55 bird species visiting Ficus rubiginosa fig trees to feed on insects. They included ten species — such as the superb fairy-wren and the shining bronze-cuckoo — whose recent declines in numbers have concerned conservationists. Mackay and his colleagues say fig trees are “very likely” to be similarly important to insect-eating birds throughout tropical, subtropical, and temperate regions globally.

To support this view, Mackay points out that in just his study and two others in localized areas of India and Costa Rica, researchers have already identified more than a hundred insect-eating birds visiting fig trees. “The presence of avian insectivores in figs in these three continents strongly suggests their occurrence in figs is ubiquitous,” he says.

“I can hazard a wild guess that there are at least several hundred species of insectivorous birds that forage in fig trees worldwide,” Mackay adds. “This has important implications for the conservation of insectivores, many of which have suffered and continue to suffer declines in response to habitat loss and fragmentation.”

As Mackay points out, the number of fig-wasps emerging from figs on a single Ficus rubiginosa tree in just a few weeks could approach ten million. He adds that insect-eating bats would also relish fig-wasps, many of which fly at night. His study adds to a growing body of evidence that fig trees are centrepieces of vast food webs that include tens of thousands of species.

“I suspect fig trees could play an important role in conservation of declining insectivores as well as contributing to the conservation of other species in the wider communities they inhabit, including frugivores and the other plants that depend on them for seed dispersal,” Mackay says.

Increasingly, researchers and conservationists are turning to fig trees to boost rainforest regeneration by attracting seed-dispersers. Mackay says that using fig trees could also slow or even reverse declines of insect-eating birds: “If we don’t do these restoration projects with figs then we stand a chance of losing these birds altogether.”

Thanks for reading. This article was first published here by Mongabay and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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I have many more astounding stories about fig trees in the pipeline. If you’ve found value in my work here, your support — whether through sharing the newsletter, commenting or becoming a paid subscriber — will help keep this project growing.

But he was right about the drop. A fall would provide plenty of opportunities to snap my neck. We were 30 metres high, dangling on a walkway that blazed an aerial trail through the rainforest canopy in Lambir Hills National Park in northern Borneo.

The walkway was little more than a series of planks suspended in mid-air by a mesh of plastic-coated cables anchored around big trees. With every step I took, the structure jolted, slid and creaked.

I tasted fear that first day. A safety harness tethered me to the walkway but I did not trust it yet. Nor the insects. Little black bees hauled their bodies over my bare arms, thirsty for my sweat. Giant ants scuttled across my hands and boots. My skin crawled. What vanquished my nerves was the view.

It was a vision of a distant past. Thick forests had dominated this landscape for a hundred million years. From the walkway we could see the crowns of thousands of trees of hundreds of species. The tallest had burst through the canopy and reached 80 metres into the sky.

Colourful sunbirds and spiderhunters, barbets and flowerpeckers accompanied us as we traversed the 300-metre walkway. Squirrels crashed from tree to tree, their fur a blur of russet and cream. They sought what I sought – a pulse of life from the forest’s beating heart.

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Siba found it first, a strangler fig whose branches bore thousands of orange figs. Within days they would be red and ripe. I would be shackled to the walkway, alone before dawn, waiting to discover what ate them.

I wrote about that morning in Gods, Wasps and Stranglers. The real story began the following week, when the figs ripened and I returned before dawn to watch what came to feed.

In Borneo — as in many other parts of the tropics — strangler figs are the pop-up restaurants of the rainforest. They feed fruit bats, primates, birds and many other species. They operate on a boom-and-bust basis, ripening vast crops of figs in just a few days, and triggering feeding frenzies that fall quiet as quickly as they begin.

To get a sense of the chaos, listen to the soundscape Vincent Chanter recorded when he was beneath a fruiting strangler fig in Sumatra, Indonesia. Then watch how wildlife converges on a single strangler fig in Borneo.

One detail often gets simplified in such portrayals. Strangler figs don’t just fruit once every couple of years — they can produce two or three crops annually. Within each species, individual stranglers fruit out of synchrony.

This fruiting pattern is the result of an 80-million-year-old partnership between fig trees and wasps so small you could inhale one and not notice. Its consequence is that, across a forest, ripe figs are available year-round — sustaining wildlife when other fruits are scarce.

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For this reason, figs have been called ‘keystone resources’ in the tropics. Without them, many animals would struggle to survive — and many plants would lose the creatures that disperse their seeds.

The keystone concept was first applied to fig (Ficus) species in 1986 by biologist John Terborgh, who warned that their loss from Peru’s Amazon basin could trigger the ecosystem’s collapse. Since then, evidence of a keystone role for figs has emerged from across the tropics.

During my doctoral research in the late 1990s, I set out to understand just how many species eat figs. By reviewing more than 400 studies, I found records of 1,280 species feeding on the figs of 260 Ficus species.

My list included around one in ten of all bird species and six percent of all mammals, as well as a handful of reptiles and fish. Even that large tally is an underestimate. My research covered less than one-third of all Ficus species, and much more has been discovered since.

Taken together, the evidence shows that figs likely feed more species of wildlife than any other kind of fruit. In doing so, they help sustain the animals that disperse the seeds of thousands of other plant species.

This is why protecting strangler figs — and planting them where they have been lost — is not just about saving a single group of trees, but about sustaining the living networks that keep tropical forests alive.

Strangler figs may sound malevolent, but they are not destroyers — they help hold entire forests together.

Thanks for reading. I have many more astounding stories about fig trees in the pipeline. If you’ve found value in my work here, your support — whether through sharing the newsletter, commenting or becoming a paid subscriber — will help keep this project growing.

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Twelve months on, I think that mission is on track.

Along the way, I’ve taken readers to rainforest canopies and city streets, explored ancient scriptures and modern science, and followed threads that connect ecology and culture around the world.

As the newsletter has grown, I’m aware that many subscribers will have missed earlier editions. So below is a selection of stories you may not have seen.

If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you — your continued interest drives me to keep writing. If you are new here, welcome. I think you’ll find something that changes how you see fig trees, and perhaps the world around you.

The Planet Ficus archive now holds a growing collection of these stories. Together, they show how understanding one remarkable group of trees can illuminate so much about life on Earth. If you’re not sure where to begin, start here: The story of fig trees is the story of us

In the coming year, I want Planet Ficus to go deeper into the science, exploring more cultures and landscapes, and connecting these stories more closely to the big issues of sustainability and resilience that matter so much today.

If that is a mission you can get behind, please like, share and subscribe.

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Highlights from the past year on Planet Ficus

New scientific discoveries

• The stone-making fig trees that lock carbon away forever

• Seventeen mammals, one strangler fig — A hidden network discovered

• Mysterious little beings really do live in Hawaiian fig trees

Spirits and the sacred

• Tales from Papua New Guinea explaining how strangler figs became respected and remembered

• The majesty and mystery of India’s sacred banyan trees

• How respect for forest spirits protects Borneo’s strangler figs — and its biodiversity

• The famed wishing fig trees of Hong Kong

• Why strangler figs are associated with ghosts and goblins

Conservation and action

• How fig trees could revolutionize reforestation

• The fight for fig trees on India’s death-trap lane

• India’s sacred fig trees are crucial for biodiversity conservation

The fig-wasp partnership that helps make the world tick

• True or false? Figs contain dead wasps

• How heat could silence the forest’s heartbeat

• How fig wasp genetics rewrote the story of a lost world

Lives shaped by fig trees

• How India’s pre-eminent ecologist Madhav Gadgil followed fig trees from sacred groves to a radical vision for governing forests.

• How strangler figs drew one man into the rainforest canopy and changed his life forever

• How India’s ‘mother of trees’ planted thousands of banyan figs, loving them as if they were her children

Life-saving fig trees

• The living fig tree bridges that provide lifelines in extreme weather

• The stranglers that save lives when cyclones strike

History, culture and change

• What happened when Christian missionaries met Kenya’s sacred fig trees

• The royal roots and modern uses of cloth made from Ugandan fig trees

• The trees of life that became agents of death

An explosion of art

• How an ancient fig tree inspired hundreds of interconnected artworks

Thanks for reading. I hope you find something here that grabs your attention. Subscribe below to receive my future dispatches from Planet Ficus.

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“There was a big aggregation of animal droppings — different shapes, different sizes, different types,” says Chamberlain, a tree safety expert specialized in raptor and canopy research. “It clearly looked like a latrine and that there were different animals using it. It was super exciting.”

Exciting, because such latrines had never been reported in a forest canopy. Until now, scientists assumed that arboreal mammals simply defecated from branches, letting their waste fall to the forest floor. The new discovery suggests something very different: that certain fig trees function as shared hubs where multiple species exchange chemical information. In doing so, the strangler figs may act not only as keystone food resources but as nodes of communication — reshaping our understanding of how life in the canopy is organized.

Hidden nodes of communication

A latrine isn’t just any place an animal goes to the toilet. It is a site animals visit repeatedly to defecate, urinate or rub scent glands, leaving chemical signals. On the ground, such sites are common. They play important roles in marking territory, signalling reproductive status and individual identities, and even limiting the spread of parasites. But until Quirós-Navarro, Chamberlain and their colleague Deiver Espinoza published their research in March 2026, no scientific study had documented latrines in the canopy.

For Quirós-Navarro, a pattern was beginning to emerge. As he told Chamberlain while they hung from the tree, it was the fourth time he had found a multi-species latrine in the same species of strangler fig, Ficus tuerckheimii.

A couple of weeks later, Chamberlain was in Honduras, leading tree canopy access for an Operation Wallacea expedition in a remote area of forest. On a day off, he came across another large strangler fig of the same species and, on a hunch, he climbed it. Sure enough, he found another multi-species latrine.

“That was the moment we decided to actively look for more in other strangler figs,” says Quirós-Navarro.

Capturing the traffic

Without any funding or institutional support, they set out to find more canopy latrines. To identify which species were using them, they installed two motion-triggered cameras near the latrine in the tree that Quirós-Navarro had climbed with Chamberlain.

The results were striking.

Over two months, the cameras recorded 181 independent visits by mammals. The animals came one by one — a mantled howler monkey, an opossum, a red-tailed squirrel and many more. In total, 17 mammal species visited the latrine.

“Working on other projects, the highest quantity of mammals I have detected in a single tree has been five species,” says Quirós-Navarro, now a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut. “But 17 in a single tree? It is almost all the canopy mammals of the cloud forest.”

Some animals came to defecate or, in the case of the margay, to spray urine. Others appeared to rub scent glands at the site. Some may simply have passed through, or visited to gather information about nearby animals.

The cameras also captured never-before-recorded footage of Hoffmann’s two-toed sloths defecating in the canopy. Until now, it had been assumed that sloths always travel to the ground to defecate. The researchers suggest that using the latrine may be safer, as each of the sloths observed was a female carrying offspring.

The cameras also recorded four members of the raccoon family — the olingo, kinkajou, cacomixtle and white-nosed coati — alongside rodents, the long-tailed weasel, the tayra, and a type of anteater called a northern tamandua. The most frequent visitor was the Mexican hairy dwarf porcupine.

“We were hoping that we might see one or two species,” says Chamberlain. “It really blew our minds just seeing so much activity in this one site.”

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Just one fig species

The camera-trapping results were remarkable, but the researchers had more to share. By combining new fieldwork with data from previous climbs, they built a dataset covering 169 trees of 29 species in three of Costa Rica’s mountain ranges. They found latrines only in Ficus tuerckheimii — and in 11 of the 15 individuals they climbed.

The researchers think latrines are concentrated in these strangler figs in part because of the tree’s structure. Each latrine was located at the tree’s main bifurcation, which formed a flat, open platform covered with moss, soil, fallen leaves and other organic matter. Location matters too.

“It is more likely to find a latrine when the Ficus is next to a river,” Quirós-Navarro told me. “The massive horizontal branches that these trees exhibit form a bridge over the river, and they act as a key connector point in the forest.”

The researchers suggest that Ficus tuerckheimii “may serve as a keystone structure in the canopy, supporting interaction and communication among arboreal mammals”.

Andy Whitworth, a research associate at Wake Forest University in the United States, who has studied terrestrial latrines of spider monkeys, calls the new study “really neat”.

“What I really appreciate is that the authors utilized cameras in a novel way to ask a specific question,” he says. “Their effort in tree climbing and field work is admirable. And then the discovery of this specific strangler fig species as the only identified latrine site is impressive.”

Whitworth says the strangler figs “must be essential for safety and information transfer between both individuals of a species and between species”, adding that he and his colleagues have detected similar information transfer sites on fallen tropical logs over rivers.

“These types of studies show that animals don’t simply move randomly on the ground, or in the trees, but choose specific areas, likely to leave signs to other animals,” he told me.

Echoes from other forests

The findings from Costa Rica resonate with research from Southeast Asia. Quentin Phillipps, an expert on figs in Borneo, suggests that the trees themselves may benefit.

“My guess is that the Costa Rican fig tree benefits from the dung as fertilizer and, if someone excavated a latrine, they would find that the fig tree had inserted adventitious feeding roots into the base of it,” he told me. “If my guess is correct, this means that the fig tree benefits from the latrine and presumably initially attracts mammals by some sort of smell.”

Phillipps also notes parallels in Borneo — where several civet species, including the binturong, have been recorded defecating on fig trees.

The first researcher to describe this was Miyabi Nakabayashi, in her doctoral thesis in 2015. In a 2019 paper, she and her colleagues described how binturongs defecated on relatively flat tree surfaces, such as tree forks, large epiphytes and large branches, often rubbing the faeces onto the surface of the defecation sites.

While the smaller civets are defecating in fig trees incidentally as they feed, the binturong appears to be more intentional.

“Regarding binturongs, they clearly formed latrines,” says Nakabayashi. “A binturong repeatedly defecated on the root masses of Cymbidium [an orchid species], and even several months later, when she returned to feed on Ficus punctata, she defecated on exactly the same Cymbidium individual.”

“Thick, stable, relatively flat branches of various fig and dipterocarp species, tree forks, and root masses of epiphytes all served as latrines,” she told me. “Small-toothed palm civets also clearly defecated in the canopy and, like binturongs, smeared faeces onto branches. However, I was not able to confirm the formation of latrines in this species.”

Quirós-Navarro was excited to learn of this research. “She has the same definition as I do: the animal is repeatedly coming to the same place to poop, regardless of if the tree is fruiting or not,” he says. “I would love to see if they consistently use fig trees more frequently than any other trees. That would be amazing.”

New questions in the canopy

The research in Costa Rica raises many new questions: Do the fig trees benefit from the nutrients? Do latrine visitors avoid each other, or interact indirectly through scent? How do insects, reptiles and amphibians use these sites? And why are latrines associated with fig trees in particular?

Quirós-Navarro and his colleagues are now monitoring other Ficus tuerckheimii trees to explore such questions. Their research adds to mounting evidence that Ficus species are central to the integrity of tropical forests, underpinning biodiversity and offering valuable opportunities for conservation and ecological restoration.

“The whole story is wonderful in many ways because it’s so revealing about what we don’t know, and how much mystery there is out there still,” says Chamberlain. “It’s very humbling.”

Learn more about the Tropical Forest Ecology Project.

Thanks for reading. For more astounding stories about the ecological and cultural importance of fig trees, see the Planet Ficus archive. To support my work please consider subscribing or sharing this post.

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Each month, I’ll bring you stories from around the world that reveal just how extraordinary fig trees are — not just biologically, but culturally, spiritually and artistically.

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In this roundup, featuring news from March 2026, you’ll find: a fig tree planted by President Xi of China, a marriage of fig trees in Bangladesh, useful figs in Ethiopia and India, new fig species from Ecuador, helpful hornbills in Malaysia, fig-planting fruit bats in Australia, and more.

Let’s dive in.

Biodiversity, conservation and forest restoration

• Scientists have described two new fig species from Ecuador: Ficus montalvoana and Ficus penafieliae, both named after renowned Ecuadorian researchers.

• A fig-focused reforestation project in Sabah, Malaysia — which I have written about here — has enlisted animal allies: big fig-eating birds called hornbills. As Charlie Elder reports, the project team collects seed-filled droppings from beneath hornbill roosts and uses them to propagate seedlings for planting.

“We don’t always know what is fruiting across the forest at any one time,” said Kathy Joseph, head of the 1StopBorneo reforestation team. “The hornbill poop contains the seeds of lots of different fig species, which we can eventually identify as the plants grow.”

• Meanwhile, researchers in Australia have quantified the ecological and economic contributions of fruit bats called grey-headed flying foxes. They estimated that the population of 578,350 individuals help recruit tens of millions of new fig trees each year.

In praise of Chinese banyans

• In China, the People’s Daily Online shared a video of a Chinese banyan (Ficus microcarpa) planted by President Xi Jinping in 1990 in Fuzhou, a city in Fujian province. The tree is now a giant. The video also highlight’s Xi’s postscript to a book about these fig trees by Lin Yan, former director of the Fuzhou Landscape Architecture Planning and Design Institute:

“The banyan tree, Fuzhou’s official city tree, has been deeply intertwined with the city’s history and development for centuries. It embodies remarkable resilience. No matter how barren the land or jagged the cliffs, it breaks through the earth, its roots intertwining and its branches reaching proudly toward the sky, standing as a symbol of the unyielding spirit of the people of Fuzhou.”

• Dongguan, a city in Guangdong province, has 37 Chinese banyans that are more than 500 years old, according to this new photo essay by Feng Huiting. Feng reports that a local term ‘rongshutou’ —literally meaning ‘banyan tree head’ — refers to the social space beneath one of these big old trees, where people gather to meet or simply pass the time.

Ancient traditions in South Asia

• In Kurigram, Bangladesh, a wedding took place between two fig trees — a banyan (Ficus benghalensis) and a pakur (Ficus rumphii). As Ronzina Karim Khushi reports, according to local custom, when these two species are growing near to each other, they should be married to prevent misfortune. In this case, the banyan was dressed as the groom and the pakur as the bride. More than 50 guests attended the event, which involved traditional ceremonies, music and rituals. Once married, the trees are considered sacred and are never cut down.

• In India, there is growing demand for Nalpamaradi Tailam, a medicinal oil made from the bark of four fig species: Ficus benghalensis, Ficus religiosa, Ficus racemosa and Ficus microcarpa. NDTV reports that the oil has been used in traditional Ayurvedic medicine for more than 3,000 years to treat a wide variety of skin conditions. Its name derives from the word nalpamaram, meaning a combination of these four sacred fig species.

The hidden biology of figs

• Bianca Thomas wrote a warm and personal reflection on the hidden truth about figs — they are not fruits but hollow chambers where flowers and tiny fig-wasps interact for mutual benefit. She explains how this relationship works, and why it makes figs among the most important trees in tropical ecosystems.

• Anoop Asranna shared a beautifully written natural history essay about the strange, intricate and often macabre world of wasps — and his wonderful encounter with fig-wasps at a cluster fig (Ficus racemosa) in India. The Apocrypta wasps he saw were not the fig’s pollinators, so do not enter a fig to lay their eggs. Instead, they use long zinc-tipped ovipositors to pierce the fig from outside so they can lay eggs in the larvae of the pollinator wasps developing within.

Fig trees as food providers, pharmacies and shapers of ecosystems

• Anjali Arya and colleagues published a paper on the ecological and medical significance importance of Ficus arnottiana — a species of fig tree adapted to rocky landscapes in the Indian subcontinent. The researchers note that this species features in many traditional medicines, sustains fruit-eating animals and contributes to forest regeneration and ecological succession in rocky habitats.

• Diriba Diba and colleagues published a book chapter about how figs of Ficus sur trees contribute to food security in Ethiopia. As well as feeding people and livestock, these figs sustain a variety of wild species including birds, antelopes and warthogs.

In Case You Missed It

Here at Planet Ficus, I wrote about what happened when Christian missionaries encountered the sacred fig trees of the Kikuyu people in Kenya. It is a story of conflict, coexistence and claims of religiously motivated ecocide.

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Do you have a memory, photo, or observation involving fig trees? I’d love to hear from you. Send your story or image to planetficus@substack.com — I’ll feature selected entries in future editions.

Thank you for reading

Thanks for being part of Planet Ficus. If you liked what you read, consider sharing it with someone who might enjoy these stories too — and if you haven’t already, please subscribe for future editions. Together we can grow a forest of readers.

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The missionaries had recently disembarked in Mombasa on the coast of what was then British East Africa. Their goal was to travel north to Abyssinia and convert local people to Christianity. But fate — and that fig tree — changed the course of their mission.

By chance, they had met the paramount chief of the Kikuyu people, Karuri wa Gakure, who invited them to his homeland to teach his community to read and write. When the missionaries arrived, he gave them a place to stay and allowed them to hold their first mass beneath the sacred mugumo tree. Karuri became one of their earliest converts.

In the years that followed, as Christianity spread through the region, mugumo trees would become the focus of cultural clashes, uneasy compromises and claims of religiously motivated ecocide.

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The sacred fig of the Kikuyu

A mugumo is a kind of strangler fig (Ficus thonningii), a species that begins life high in the crown of another tree and slowly envelops its host, growing into a vast living structure that can appear almost immortal. These trees are traditional symbols of Kikuyu society. They are sites of religious ceremonies, homes to ancestral spirits, and places where elders can receive guidance from Ngai. To cut down a sacred mugumo is taboo.

Beyond their spiritual importance, mugumo trees also play a crucial ecological role. As with other Ficus species, they can produce figs at different times of year, sustaining seed-dispersing birds, bats and primates when other fruits are scarce. Long before ecologists applied the term ‘keystone species’ to fig trees, communities across Africa — and beyond — already recognized their central roles in sustaining life around them.

But to some missionaries arriving in the early twentieth century, the mugumo fig trees represented something very different. Costanzo Cagnolo, a missionary active in Kenya at the time, called them “temples of Kikuyu paganism”. More than a century later, the question of what missionaries, other settlers and converts to Christianity did to sacred mugumo trees remained contested.

Did missionaries cut down mugumos?

Concerns about the fate of these trees were already being voiced during the colonial era. In 1938, Kenya’s future prime minister Jomo Kenyatta wrote that European settlers had cut down all but one of the sacred mugumos in his neighbourhood. According to Kenyatta, some Kikuyu converts to Christianity wanted to fell the final tree to remove what they saw as “the influence of Satan”. Elders intervened to save it.

In a 2006 interview, Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai claimed that missionaries and their converts had felled many mugumos in their zeal to replace the Kikuyu god of the tree with the Christian god of the church. Missionaries were “very eager to get rid of all these trees,” she said.

David Anderson, professor of African history at Warwick University, disputes this. “There are a couple of notorious incidents where local missionaries cut down mugumo trees, but only on land they had been granted for mission stations or schools,” he told me. “The idea that they had any kind of campaign or that there was significant destruction of trees on Kikuyu Reserve land is frankly ridiculous.”

Other scholars see things differently. Matthew Karangi, whose doctoral research focused on the role of mugumo trees in Kikuyu religion, argues that the process of evangelization was often deeply hostile to local customs. “It was at times brutal,” he told me. “Missionaries were strategically cutting down ceremonial mugumo trees in order to weaken the African belief.”

During his research, Karangi interviewed people who recalled that new converts to Christianity had deliberately uprooted sacred mugumo trees in several parts of central Kenya. Yet beyond a handful of published oral testimonies that describe Kikuyu converts burning or cutting down mugumo trees, documentary evidence remains scarce.

When faiths met beneath fig trees

Ben Knighton, a scholar of Kikuyu history at the University of Oxford, warns against oversimplified narratives and treating all missionaries as the same.

“It is easy to blame ‘the missionaries’ — who were always a mixed bunch — for everything,” he told me. “While some might have written off rituals at the sacred groves as pagan or heathen, the British ones had a liberal view of traditional religions and were not in the business of demonizing trees.”

Knighton doubts that many converts would have been able to harm sacred fig trees without upsetting both the Kikuyu elders and the colonial administration. He also points that the relationship between missionaries and mugumo trees was not always confrontational.

In the 1920s, a missionary called William Rampley complained to the British Colonial Office that road building was destroying fig trees. Thanks to his intervention, a new road was diverted around a mugumo at Kabare, sparing it from the axe. Other missionaries went further, seeking ways to connect Kikuyu beliefs and Christian teachings.

Karangi says some missionaries, after many years of living among the Kikuyu and learning their traditions, became convinced that Christianity needed to be adapted to local culture. For groups that lamented how other missionaries had treated sacred mugumos, he says, these trees became tools of evangelization. Some missionaries portrayed sacrifices performed beneath mugumo trees as echoes of the ‘Great Sacrifice’ of Christ. They built churches beside sacred fig trees where Kikuyu elders had long prayed to their god Ngai when the rains failed.

A Catholic church now stands at the site of the fig tree under which the Italian missionaries performed their first mass in 1902. It houses the mausoleum of Karuri wa Gakure, the Kikuyu chief who welcomed them. At another mission station in Tumutumu near Nyeri, a Church of Scotland missionary named Arthur Barlow agreed to preserve a path through the mission’s compound so Kikuyu elders could continue visiting a sacred mugumo tree nearby.

When a storm felled the tree in 1930, the missionaries sent its trunk to Scotland, where it was carved into a cross and returned to Kenya to be displayed in the church. Karangi says this was a symbol of religious colonization: “The mugumo has been replaced by Christ.”

The mugumo in modern Kenya

Debate over the religious meaning of sacred fig trees did not disappear with the colonial era. In 1996, Kenya’s parliament argued over whether three sacred mugumos should be formally protected as national shrines. Stephen Ndicho, the Member of Parliament for Juja, said the government should safeguard them, so that “if we fail to get our prayers answered in the churches we can go back to ask our Ngai to give us rain”.

Rejecting this idea outright, Lwali Oyondi, the representative for Nakuru, retorted: “This is devil worship!”

Yet for many Kikuyu Christians, there is room in their faith for both the church and the fig tree. One hymn sung in Catholic churches declares: “Ngai is the mugumo that never dries, while Christians are its branches.” For many believers, Christianity did not erase older traditions but absorbed elements of them.

Julius Gathogo, a senior lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at Kenyatta University, told me that Kikuyu converts saw the new African Christianity as a continuation of their old religion, so they retained elements of the old that were compatible with the new.

“The Kikuyu Christians largely remained beholden to the African religiosity that viewed the mugumo as an extraordinary tree with theo-religious significance,” he says.

A mugumo near Mount Kenya captures that blend of belief. Part of its trunk has been hollowed out and sealed with a small door. Painted on the door are the Ten Commandments. Behind it sits a Bible. Open the book and you will find it is dedicated to the Kikuyu god Ngai — and to the fig tree itself.

More than a century after missionaries first held a Christian service beneath a sacred mugumo, these trees still stand at the intersection of faith. While many Kikuyu people embraced Christianity, the sacred fig trees proved too deeply rooted to leave behind.

Thanks for reading. Mugumo fig trees have played many curious roles in Kenya, from wartime lookout post to clandestine post office, and from conduit of divine power to symbol of society. In the story I tell in my book, Gods, Wasps and Stranglers, they star alongside a queen, a seer and the most wanted man in the British Empire.

Kenya’s Kikuyu are not alone in giving strangler figs special status. These awesome and ecologically important plants have rooted themselves in diverse cultures around the world. Below are some related stories from India and Indonesian Borneo. I have many more to tell.

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Each month, I’ll bring you stories from around the world that reveal just how extraordinary fig trees are — not just biologically, but culturally, spiritually and artistically.

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In this roundup, featuring news from February 2026, you’ll find: figs saving howler monkeys in Mexico, sacred figs of Sudan and Egypt, figs protecting penguins in Australia, culturally important fig species in Myanmar and Nigeria, heritage figs in India, and more.

Let’s dive in.

Ecology and Conservation

• The year-round availability of figs is a boon to fruit eating animals. New research in Mexico explored why exactly it is that figs are so important to mantled howler monkeys. Researchers Pedro Dias and Ariadna Rangel-Negrín analyzed 20 years of data to test five possible explanations. Over this period, the monkeys allocated 77 percent of their feeding time to 11 fig species. The researchers showed that figs matter because their presence prevents the total amount of available food from falling below a critical threshold.

• In other words, figs did not just supplement the monkeys’ diet — they prevented starvation. Overall, figs rescued the howler monkeys from food scarcity in 72 of the study’s 491 weeks of monitoring. The researchers say their findings show that fig trees should be explicitly protected in conservation planning, shielded from logging and used in forest restoration projects.

• In Australia, the National Parks and Wildlife Service of New South Wales will plant native fig trees on an island nature reserve to improve habitat around little penguin burrows. The planting forms part of a wider project aimed at protecting species at risk from a potential bird flu outbreak.

• The Times of India told the story of how Uttar Pradesh became the first state in India to institutionalize conservation of ‘living heritage’ when, in 2021, it identified 948 heritage trees aged at least one hundred years old. A remarkable 88 percent of the trees belong to just three fig species — a reflection of longstanding cultural reverence towards these trees.

Traditional Uses of Wild Fig Species

• Aye Mya Mon and colleagues published research on the significance of nine Ficus species to the Pa-O people in Myanmar, who use these ‘cultural keystone species’ in their diets and traditional medicines. The study also discusses the ecological importance of figs. It calls for traditional practices associated with socio-economically important species to be integrated with scientific knowledge and sustainable management strategies to enhance tropical forest restoration.

• Nigerian health writer Olufunke described how Ficus exasperata leaves, bark, roots and figs are widely used across West and Central Africa to treat disorders including: inflammation, hypertension, infections, pain and burns. This species also has many practical uses — from processing palm oil to polishing wood and constructing canoes, furniture and drums.

Exceptional Figs

• The paperback edition of Olivia Sprinkel’s book To Hear the Trees Speak was published on 12 February. It features two fig species — the banyan (Ficus benghalensis) and the bodhi (Ficus religiosa) — among ten trees from which Sprinkel draws lessons for life in a fast-changing world.

• British magazine Time Out included the ‘double decker’ living fig tree bridge in Meghalaya, India in its list of the world’s most beautiful bridges — see my story on the origins and persistence of these amazing structures: How Living Fig Tree Bridges Provide Lifelines in Extreme Weather

• Figs also took three of the ten places in Discover Wildlife’s list of ‘epic photos of the most monumental trees on Earth’. Which do think is most iconic?

Sacred Fig Trees

Julien Cooper and colleagues published a fascinating paper providing evidence that ancient Egyptians adopted traditions associated with sacred sycamore figs (Ficus sycomorus) from the Beja people of what is now Sudan.

• Using a combination of biological, linguistic and cultural clues, the researchers were able to connect sacred-tree traditions of antiquity with present-day practices.

• Together, these strands suggest a long-standing religious exchange between Egypt and the Beja, who today are Muslims but retain some pre-Islamic religious beliefs.

Strange Fig Biology

From Quentin Phillipps’s website Figs of Borneo come three examples of atypical reproduction by Ficus species. The first two cases are of figs that can reproduce asexually as well as through normal sexual reproduction:

• Ficus grandiflora produces small roots that develop into structures called bulbils — see the photos. Heavy rain or floods can wash these bulbils off the plant and carry them to new sites, where they develop into clones of the parent tree.

• Ficus carrii uses a different approach. It appears to reproduce partly by producing tiny clonal propagules on the outside of its figs, meaning animals that eat the fruit may disperse both seeds and ready‑made clones of the parent plant.

• Ficus uncinulata reproduces sexually like most figs, but differs in how its seeds are dispersed. While most Ficus species rely on fruit-eating animals to provide this service, this one has another tactic. Its figs are covered with tiny hooked hairs that attach to the fur of passing animals — as seen in this photo of a cat at the Sabah Ficus Germplasm Centre, whose work I wrote about here: How Fig Trees Could Revolutionize Reforestation

In Case You Missed It

Two stories I published here at Planet Ficus in February 2026:

Over To You

Do you have a memory, photo, or observation involving fig trees? I’d love to hear from you. Send your story or image to planetficus@substack.com — I’ll feature selected entries in future editions.

Thank you for reading

Thanks for being part of Planet Ficus. If you liked what you read, consider sharing it with someone who might enjoy these stories too — and if you haven’t already, please subscribe for future editions. Together we can grow a forest of readers.

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The tree stands beside a temple built more than 250 years ago to honour Tin Hau, the sea goddess who protects sailors and fishermen. Long ago, villagers believed that a camphor tree on the site could make wishes come true. In time, the camphor tree died but the belief lived on as people’s hopes migrated to the large fig trees (Ficus microcarpa) growing nearby.

Wish-granting fig trees are not unique to Hong Kong. They appear in stories from places as diverse as Brazil, Sudan and India —part of a wider constellation of spiritual, religious and cosmological traditions surrounding fig trees across the planet. In Lam Tsuen, the belief took a distinct form.

To make a wish, fishermen used to write their desires on paper, tie the paper to a stone and throw it into one of the tree’s branches. If the bundle remained suspended in the canopy, they believed the wish would come true. If it fell, the tree had rejected it. The higher the hurled wish landed, the better its chance of coming true.

In the 1990s, as television soap operas popularized the tradition across Hong Kong, stones were replaced by oranges — both safer and symbolically associated with prosperity. By the early 2000s, the old wishing tree had become one of Hong Kong’s most popular Lunar New Year attractions.

Each winter, the tree accumulated thousands of orange-weighted wishes. In February 2005, the burden became too much. A large branch snapped and crashed to the ground, injuring a 62-year-old man and a four-year-old boy who had been throwing oranges into the tree.

After the incident, authorities intervened. Throwing oranges at the fig tree was forbidden. Poles were put in place to support its branches. In 2009, the artificial fig tree was installed to replace it as the focus of wish-making.

Today, visitors throw plastic oranges at the replica tree. Before launching them skyward, they can tick boxes on an attached list of common wishes — success in business and exams, safe travel, wealth, heath, happiness, love and peace.

The real fig tree is still there, aided by its supports. Its canopy is lighter now and some dead branches have been removed. No-one can be sure how old it is or how long it has left to live. For now, it watches over its replacement — the artificial tree installed to absorb the annual storm of aspirations.

It is a joyous scene. People of all ages come to write down their hopes for the future and cast them at the wish-fulfilling tree. Music and incense fill the air. Stalls offer games and local delicacies.

What began as fishermen’s pleas for luck at sea has become a major cultural attraction, boosting the local economy and drawing as many as 60,000 visitors on the busiest day of the Lunar New Year holiday. If those original fishermen ever wished for prosperity for their families, then their hopes have, in a sense, come true. Their descendants have built a thriving celebration rooted in that old belief.

Thank you for reading. I’m grateful you’re here under the canopy of Planet Ficus. Each story is a reminder that we are all connected — to each other, to other species and to the trees themselves. If you know someone who would enjoy these connections, please pass this newsletter along or invite them to subscribe.

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When I recently shared some stories of supernatural beings associated with fig trees in Papua New Guinea, Amanda Royal — publisher of Earth Hope — commented recalling her childhood in Hawai’i.

When she and other children played among the aerial roots of large banyan trees (Ficus benghalensis), they told stories about the menehune — legendary little people said to live in forests, emerging at night to work unseen.

The banyans made it easy to believe. Their roots form ladders and corridors. Their trunks open into hollows where a child could crawl and momentarily lose their bearings. “A magical, mystical place indeed,” Amanda wrote. “Nature’s best jungle gym.”

She added a caveat: “I can’t find any official association between menehune and banyan, so it must have been kids’ imaginations and storytelling.”

The word menehune was new to me. Today it’s commonly used to refer to magical little people, but its deeper history — and how it has been interpreted and reinterpreted over time — is worth reading. Curious, I went looking for a connection with fig trees, half-hoping to find a folk tale linking the two.

What I found instead was something far more unexpected.

A new discovery

I learned that, in 2022, scientists had described a new species of “beautiful but minuscule” parasitic wasp from Hawaii. The insect, less than one millimetre long, lives almost entirely out of sight. It parasitizes the eggs of bark lice living on fig trees —not Amanda’s banyans, but another kind of strangler fig called Ficus microcarpa.

They named the species Mymaromma menehune.

Explaining the choice, David Honsberger and colleagues wrote that the wasp’s tiny size and elusiveness recalled the menehune, “in Hawaiian legend, a people who were small and not often seen, that live in the forests and are known for being industrious craftspeople who emerge during the night and build structures.”

Mystery, solved

Mymaromma menehune belongs to a group of minute parasitic wasps known to science for only about a century. Fossils preserved in amber show, however, that they have existed for nearly 100 million years. Until recently, nothing was known about their biology.

These wasps have unusual adaptations. The backs of their heads can expand like bellows. Their jaws — known as exodont mandibles — push outward rather than inward. Based on these and other features, scientists had suspected that the wasps might parasitize the eggs of bark lice, with emerging adults using their expandable heads and reversed jaws to break out through the eggs’ flexible shells.

Honsberger and colleagues finally confirmed this hunch.

After finding the tiny wasps emerging from branches of a Ficus microcarpa tree on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, on the island of O’ahu, the teams cut a section of wood and suspended it from the tree for six weeks. They then examined its surface under a microscope, carefully collecting bark louse eggs and placing them individually in gel capsules. From some of these eggs, the Mymaromma menehune wasps emerged.

By rearing morphologically identical bark louse eggs, the researchers identified the host as a species of Lepidopsocus. It was the first time anyone had confirmed the host species for a member of this ancient group of wasps.

Stories yet untold

To give the wasp a Hawaiian name, Honsberger collaborated with Hauʻoli Lorenzo-Elarco, an assistant professor of Hawaiian language at Honolulu Community College whose doctoral research is on traditional naming practices in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific.

Together, they chose lihihune. The name derives from hune, meaning tiny, and lihilihi, meaning eyelashes or petals. It refers both to the hair-like fringes on the wasp’s wings, and to their resemblance to the flowers of the ʻōhiʻa lehua tree (Metrosideros polymorpha).

“There’s still essentially nothing known about the biology of these creatures,” says Honsberger, now with Biocontrol Exploration, LLC. “Now that we know a place to find this species — and that lepidopsocid bark lice eggs are a promising place to look for others — I hope someone might take up this project.”

“You could try to watch them emerge from eggs, to see how they use their exodont mandibles and expandable head. You could maybe try to watch them take off and fly, to see how they use their unique wings. Or if you go out looking and don’t find them, there’s a good chance you’ll find something else just as interesting.”

The menehune of Amanda’s childhood stories may not have truly lived in Hawai’i’s fig trees. But something just as enigmatic does.

What draws me to me this story is the parallel of hidden worlds. At one level, a strangler fig can host childhood myths and imaginary villages. At another, it shelters microscopic worlds — bark lice laying eggs, wasps smaller than a grain of sand slipping in to parasitize them, all this drama playing out beyond human sight.

“It speaks to the importance of unmaintained areas — islands of biodiversity —in an urban environment,” Honsberger told me by email, “It’s such a big world, with so many little creatures living their lives doing all kinds of different things that us bigger, clumsier humans often don’t pick up on.”

It’s a reminder that the world is fuller than it looks, and that some of its most interesting inhabitants are the ones we never see. This tale of a minuscule species living quietly on fig trees for tens of millions of years is also reminder also to stay curious: to follow trails from children’s stories into the hidden corners of nature, and out the other side.

Thanks for reading — and special thanks to Amanda Royal for sharing her connection to fig trees and sending me down an unexpected trail of discovery. Find her Earth Hope newsletter here.

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Each month, I’ll bring you stories from around the world that reveal just how extraordinary fig trees are — not just biologically, but culturally, spiritually and artistically.

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In this roundup, featuring news from January 2026, you’ll find: living bridges, flying foxes, a tennis superstar, a lost temple, an animated banyan, a ladder for primates, and more.

Let’s dive in.

Living Fig Tree Bridges

I have written here before about the awesome living bridges of the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, a state in northeast India. See:

Created over decades — and in some cases lasting for centuries — the bridges are formed from Ficus elastica roots that local people guide across streams and gorges, shaping them into stable structures. They were in the news twice in January.

• The Indian government awarded the Padma Shri — one of its highest civilian honours — to Hally War, a local man who has spent nearly 60 years nurturing living fig tree bridges and preserving the traditional knowledge of how to make them.

• “I am grateful and happy that people are now understanding the value of our traditional knowledge.” War told India Today NE: “This honour belongs to my village and to our forefathers who taught us to live with nature, not against it.”

• On 29 January, India submitted its formal proposal for the living bridges to be included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Meghalaya’s Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma said: “We are hopeful that the living root bridges will be inscribed this year, ensuring that the indigenous communities, the true guardians of this living heritage, receive the global recognition they so richly deserve.”

Pacific Figs, Spirits and Stories

• Else Demeulenaere wrote about a long‑lived fig tree (Ficus microcarpa) on the campus of the University of Guam, explaining that it was likely spared because of its spiritual importance to the Indigenous Chamorro people.

• Nalau Bingeding — an environmental consultant from Papua New Guinea — and George Weiblen, a biologist who has studied the country’s Ficus species, have both shared folk stories with me about strangler figs. I published those stories here:

Friends of the Fig Trees

• The Australian Open tennis tournament once again gave journalists around the world an excuse to tell a familiar story whenever Novak Djokovic is competing. That’s because he is known for visiting, climbing, hugging and meditating beneath a big fig tree in Melbourne‘s botanical gardens.

• “That is my oldest friend here in Melbourne,” Djokovic told Agence France Presse. “He has been there to heal my wounds and give me company. It’s a beautiful connection, nature is such a powerful ally. We have a friendship going over 20 years.”

• Djokovic’s affection for the tree contrasts sharply with darker fig-related news from the same week. On the day the Australian Open began, The Guardian reported that thousands of large fruit bats called flying foxes had died in a heatwave in Melbourne. It was the largest mass mortality event for these animals since the ‘Black Summer’ of 2019-2020 — and the third such event since 2008. Over a lifetime, each bat disperses millions of fig seeds. Every heatwave tears at that ancient bond.

Figs in Art and Culture

• Artist Eeman Masood shared her new hand-painted animation, a mesmerizing six-minute visual rumination on the banyan tree’s (Ficus benghalensis) place in nature and culture, spanning the earthly and celestial. Titled There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen, the animation will be shown publicly on nearly a hundred digital displays in Times Square, New York City at three minutes to midnight each night in February. You can watch it here:

• In the United States, the National Garden Bureau named 2026 the ‘Year of the Ficus’. Of course, I would argue that every year is the Year of the Ficus — and not just for houseplants.

• A 900-year-old temple from the later Chola period was rediscovered after being hidden for centuries beneath a massive banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) in southern India.

Figs of Borneo

Quentin Phillipps’s website Figs of Borneo has an interesting new post about Ficus densechini — a fig species that grows from a seed on the forest floor and then climbs up large trees to obtain more light. Over time, the spiny stem of Ficus densechini forms a rigid “ladder” that helps seed-dispersing primates and civets reach its large figs. The structure simultaneously supports its host tree — until both eventually die together.

Other Figs of Borneo posts in the past month include:

• Some great photos of Ficus kerkhovenii — Borneo’s biggest and most variable strangler fig.

• Images of fig-wasps emerging from Ficus heterophylla figs.

• The first record of Ficus altissima in Borneo.

Figs and Forest Politics

Here at Planet Ficus, I wrote about how fig trees shaped the thinking of India’s pre-eminent ecologist, Madhav Gadgil, who died on 7 January. From a night spent sheltering in a wild Ficus in the Western Ghats to decades of writing on ecology, culture and governance, figs recur in Gadgil’s work as both biological keystones and moral touchstones.

My piece explores how his ideas were shaped by the ecological knowledge and traditions of forest-dependent communities — and why he believed lasting conservation must place power back in their hands.

Over To You

Do you have a memory, photo, or observation involving fig trees? I’d love to hear from you. Send your story or image to planetficus@substack.com — I’ll feature selected entries in future editions.

Thank you for reading

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It was a memorable moment in a long career spent understanding and advocating for India’s forests, and for the people and wildlife that depend on them. Gadgil went on to become India’s pre-eminent ecologist — an advisor to prime ministers, a shaper of policy, and, in 2024, a recipient of the UN’s highest environmental honour, the Champions of the Earth Award. He passed away on 7 January 2026, aged 83.

Others have written eloquently about his life and legacy — including Rhett Ayers Butler, Mandar Datar and Jairam Ramesh, a former environment minister of India. Here at Planet Ficus, I want to focus on what Gadgil learned, thought and wrote about fig species — because these extraordinary trees form a thread running through his science, ethics and politics. They informed his core belief that conservation and human wellbeing can, and must, be balanced.

Keystone figs

It was in the Western Ghats in the 1970s that Gadgil developed his lifelong interest in sacred groves and in people’s widespread reverence for fig trees — such as the banyan (Ficus benghalensis) and the peepal (Ficus religiosa). He observed that rural communities often spared Ficus trees when clearing forest.

Gadgil learned how local people understood that fig trees play an outsized role in forest ecology by feeding a wide variety of animals when other fruit is scarce — and therefore should be left standing even when surrounding forest had to be cleared for agriculture.

He noted that elephant handlers in the Bandipur Tiger Reserve explained the ecological importance of figs to him as early as 1974 — a full decade before academic research formally described fig trees as “keystone” resources, meaning species that have a disproportionate impact on their surrounding ecosystems.

That research, conducted in the Amazon, emphasized how fig trees sustain fruit-eating animals year-round — including when other fruit trees are barren. This pattern is created by the fig trees’ interdependence with specific kinds of tiny pollinating wasps. Gadgil went on to popularize the idea that Ficus species are also keystone resources in India, sustaining a great variety of birds, bats, monkeys and other mammals.

Joining the dots

By the late 1980s, Gadgil was explicitly joining the dots between the widespread cultural protection of fig trees and the biodiversity benefits that flowed from their keystone role. He wrote about how communities had considered various fig species sacred since ancient times, and how these protected trees formed a nationwide network of micro-conservation sites. In this sense, sacred fig trees functioned as islands of biodiversity scattered across the subcontinent. Writing in 1998, he observed:

“India’s countryside remains dotted with hundreds and thousands of Ficus trees and associated insects, birds, mammals entirely thanks to our cultural traditions. In many Indian towns and cities too, the only surviving large sized trees are such Ficus trees.”

Gadgil theorized that taboos against harming fig trees had originated thousands of years ago in hunter-gatherer communities that understood — through direct experience — that conserving fig trees helped maintain populations of huntable wildlife. Over time, stories and, later, religious veneration reinforced these taboos, sustaining them even as communities shifted from hunting to farming.

He argued that these traditions constituted an ancient form of biodiversity conservation. They created refugia where rare species could survive, and they helped maintain ecological connectivity in otherwise fragmented landscapes. Gadgil used taboos protecting fig trees as a clear example of how Indigenous and local communities conserved natural resources through rules enforced by religious and social convention.

Cultural shift

Fig trees also featured prominently in Gadgil’s analysis of what was going wrong with India’s forests. He wrote about how state forestry agencies had clear-felled sacred groves and treated ecologically important wild fig trees as either nuisances to be eliminated or timber resources to be exploited.

In 2001, he wrote:

“The plywood industry has been responsible for the over-exploitation of several species of evergreen forest trees, including Ficus nervosa. Public Works Departments have delighted in felling grand old banyan trees [Ficus benghalensis] lining the avenues. Village folk too are beginning to liquidate the great woody mass of banyan [Ficus benghalensis], peepal [Ficus religiosa], athi [Ficus racemosa] and other species that has been built up over generations.”

Gadgil felt that Indian authorities were continuing — and in some cases intensifying — the ecologically destructive practices established under British colonial rule. In a few stark words published in 2001, he captured the scale and nature of this cultural shift:

“Ficus trees are no longer sacrosanct, as old beliefs disintegrate under the weight of market forces.”

Gadgil continued to observe these changes well into later life. When heavy rain and deadly landslides struck Puthumala in Kerala in 2019, he went to assess the damage. He noted that the only tree that had resisted being swept away was a lone Ficus beddomei. This species had once been common in the area, but had been removed along with other native vegetation and replaced with plantations of non-native Eucalyptus trees.

Describing the scene in 2024, he wrote: “This clearly brought out the fact that the replacement of the original natural tree cover by exotics like eucalyptus had contributed to this disaster.”

Guards and guns

For Gadgil, these changes were not merely ecological failures but political ones. They reflected a transfer of authority away from communities with lived ecological knowledge and towards distant bureaucracies and commercial interests, severing long-standing relationships between people and place.

Gadgil’s experiences taught him that environmental degradation in India was deeply tied to unequal access to resources. Local communities were often blamed for harms such as deforestation, even when the primary drivers were private companies and state agencies.

“State policy sees Indian people as the enemy of nature and decrees that official machinery will guard it with the force of guns,” he wrote in 2001. “That of course is nonsense. On the contrary, people are being forced to launch agitations against various departments of government callously cutting down giant old banyan trees.”

Because communities had, in fact, conserved biodiversity for generations, Gadgil argued that they possessed deep ecological knowledge — and that the responsibility for conservation should rest with them. He consistently called for the devolution of rights and responsibilities for managing and conserving natural resources to village-level bodies called panchayats.

Paying for protection

Fig trees became a recurring, concrete example through which Gadgil articulated this broader vision of decentralized, people-led conservation. He repeatedly used fig trees to illustrate how traditional knowledge systems and modern ecological science could converge rather than conflict. As early as 1993, Gadgil called for support to traditional practices that maintained keystone Ficus species in rural habitats, roadsides, farms and canal bunds.

In 2001, he proposed that the Indian state divert some of the vast sums it spent on what he called its “thoroughly ineffective apparatus of guns and guards” and instead “pay village panchayats to continue giving their protection to Ficus trees” and other traditionally conserved species.

“This money could be fruitfully used for community welfare facilities and schemes at the discretion of the local people,” he wrote. “Gradually a broad-based system of nature conservation could be created as a genuine people’s movement, grounded in our traditions of respect for all life. Only such an approach would permit us to halt the destruction of nature all around us.”

Roots of influence

“Madhav Gadgil is best known for his people-centric conservation approaches, sustainable resource use, and deep regard for the social aspects of ecology,” says Mohan Chandra Pargaien, a former Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Chief Wildlife Warden of Telangana State.

He told me that Gadgil’s understanding of the keystone role of figs and protective taboos against harming these trees had shaped his inputs to India’s Biological Diversity Act of 2002, “embedding concepts for involving local communities in managing biological resources [and] blending traditional knowledge with science.”

“This emphasis on figs was later widely recognized and accepted by India’s foresters, with large afforestation programmes prioritizing native species, including various fig species, in recent years.”

“He was particularly insistent that forest-dependent communities possess sophisticated ecological knowledge of fig trees, derived from lived experience rather than formal science,” says N. Chandra Mohan Reddy, a co-author of Figs of Eastern Ghats, India, whose foreword Gadgil wrote in 2017.

“Perhaps most importantly, the late Professor Gadgil argued that the central challenge in conservation is not lack of awareness, but lack of empowerment,” he told me. “While scientists and educated elites may celebrate figs as symbols of biodiversity, he believed durable conservation would only occur when local communities were entrusted with genuine decision-making authority, as envisaged under India’s Forest Rights Act.”

“In this sense, his thinking on Ficus bridges ecology, culture, and governance: fig trees exemplify both the biological foundations of forest resilience and the long-standing, yet often underappreciated, conservation ethic embedded in traditional forest-dwelling communities.”

For more than half a century after a fig tree protected him from elephants in the dark, Madhav Gadgil kept returning to Ficus species. Rooted at the meeting point between culture and ecology, they revealed a path to harmony between people and the wider natural world.

Thanks for reading. Planet Ficus is where I share stories about how fig trees have shaped our species and the world around us. See below for a sample, and please like, share and subscribe if you would like to support my work.

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It is no surprise, then, that many cultures view strangler figs as more than mere trees. They are characters, connections to supernatural realms and embodiments of ancient knowledge.

What follows are two stories from Papua New Guinea — one shared with me directly this week, the other passed on by a biologist years ago. They offer very different explanations for why strangler figs are feared, respected and remembered. Together, they sit at the boundary of mythic imagination and ecological truth.

Instruction through fear

Nalau Bingeding is an environmental consultant who grew up in Waganluhu village in Papua New Guinea’s Morobe Province. With a background in forestry, forest science and policy analysis, he is also the author of Short Stories from the Huon Gulf of Papua New Guinea, an ebook of myths, legends, and modern-day stories.

This is what Nalau told me:

In my area, fig trees are regarded as houses for spirits that are not of humans. We believe that these spirits are not friends of human beings, and they cause sickness, disease and other bad things to humans who interfere or come into direct contact with these large fig trees.

As children we were told by our parents and relatives never to go near large fig trees, but to avoid them as much as possible. If a large fig tree was along the track to our gardens, we were told not to go alone past the fig tree, but to walk in groups.

Nalau then shared a chilling childhood experience:

As a kid, I once ventured near a large fig tree that was right in the middle of a paddock on my family’s cattle ranch. As it was a paddock with grass all around, with the large fig tree right in the middle of the paddock, I reasoned that I had no reason to fear spirits in the fig tree.

But as I passed alone under the large fig tree, I heard the sound of a Jew’s harp being played from above me. This gave me goose bumps, and I had to run for my life.

I arrived at home, panting and sweating. My mother saw me and asked what was wrong, but I simply said I ran and was out of breath. I did not want to tell her the truth because I did not want to be in trouble.

The danger associated with fig trees does not end when they fall:

When large fig trees fall over or are deliberately cut down for gardening, lots of snakes will come out from them. These, our people believe, are the spirits that had been dwelling in there.

Nalau told me how other supernatural beings are also said to inhabit the trees.

My people also believe that dwarves live in large fig trees. And if you want to see the dwarves with your own eyes, you have go quietly to places where lots of fig trees grow and hide from a distance from the trees to see dwarves coming out to play in the middle of the day.

There are stories where village kids had encountered dwarves near fig trees and played with them, not knowing there were dwarves. Only after, they realised that the children they were playing with were not from their village — and they realised they were dwarves.

I am grateful to Nalau for allowing me to quote him in full here. What struck me most in his account is not just fear, but instruction. These stories serve to regulate how people move and act around strangler figs, embedding a clear message that these trees should be approached with caution — or left alone altogether.

Such stories are common across the tropics. Though framed in supernatural terms, they have real-world consequences. Protecting strangler figs means protecting the plants that sustain most of a forest’s seed-dispersing animals — something I wrote about recently in relation to new research in Indonesian Borneo.

Why Strangler Figs Strangle

Hearing Nalau’s stories reminded me of another account from Papua New Guinea — one that explains why strangler figs do what they do.

It was sent to me some years ago by George Weiblen, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota who has studied Papua New Guinea’s Ficus species extensively. He shared with me his English translation of a folktale told to him in Tok Pisin by local botanist Brus Isua.

George prefaced the story with a note: In the Amele language, Meb means ‘kwila’ — the strongest timber in Papua New Guinea (a tree called Intsia bijuga, or ‘merbau’ in Indonesian) — and Ajaoaid and Glumaid are the two largest kinds of strangler fig in the forest.

The story goes like this.

Meb was the leader of his clan but he was both a man and a woman. As a chief he married two women named Ajaoaid and Glumaid. His wives cared for chickens, ducks, dogs and pigs. They all lived in a house on top of a hill.

At mealtimes, Meb was disturbed by the noise of the animals and one day he yelled at Ajaoaid and Glumaid.

“Get out of my house and go to hell!” he said.

The two wives gathered up the animals and left in anger yelling, “You’re not even a man!” In fact, Meb had the anatomy of a woman.

The people of the village, who often benefited from the livestock raised by Meb’s wives, were so upset that they attacked and murdered Meb. So his wives went on to live with other men.

This is why today, Ajaoaid and Glumaid, the two largest kinds of strangling figs in the forest not only wrap themselves around Meb the kwila but also throw their legs around many different big timbers.

Unlike Nalau’s story, this one is almost playful. Yet it encodes close ecological observation: strangler figs do not depend on a single species of host. They can grow on many different trees and thrive across a forest.

One moral of the story is that relationships (the ability of the figs to grow on many hosts) matter more than individual strength (the kwila tree with its hard timber). There is also a lesson about the consequences of abusing those who provide sustenance. In the mythic world, Ajaoaid and Glumaid cared for the livestock that benefitted the villagers. In the natural world, strangler figs sustain wildlife on which people also depend.

Protect the Fig, Protect the Forest

Together, these stories reveal something essential about strangler figs. They are not passive background players in the drama of forest life. They are main actors, shaping the ecology of the world around them.

In Papua New Guinea — as in so many other places — people understood this long ago, and they told stories powerful enough to make an important lesson stick: protect strangler figs and good will come of it.

Thanks for reading. I have many more astounding stories about fig trees in the pipeline. If you’ve found value in my work here, your support — whether through sharing the newsletter, commenting or becoming a paid subscriber — will help keep this project growing.

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Each month, I’ll bring you stories from around the world that reveal just how extraordinary fig trees are — not just biologically, but culturally, spiritually and artistically.

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In this roundup, featuring news from December 2025, you’ll find: stingless bees nesting in urban figs in Thailand, figs versus snakebites, a Vietnamese bonsai with a record-breaking canopy, research suggesting climate change could reshape fig–pest relationships, planting fig trees to restore degraded land in India, aphrodisiac figs in Nigeria, and more.

Let’s dive in.

Ecology and Biodiversity of Fig-Associated Animals

Three new studies reinforce how fig trees are connected to many other species, even in urban settings.

• Researchers found 78 species of insects, spiders and other arthropods associated with fig trees (Ficus carica) in an orchard in Algeria.

• In Taiwan, researchers showed that fig trees are an important resource for urban fruit-eating birds — and especially for introduced bird species which are already familiar with figs from their native countries.

• Stingless bees are important pollinators in tropical regions. New research shows that, in urban areas of southern Thailand, large fig trees — including Ficus microcarpa, Ficus religiosa and Ficus annulata — are among the top nesting sites for these bees.

Outstanding Specimens

• An article by Ngoc Phuc brought to my attention a record-breaking fig tree in Vietnam. The Ficus benjamina is the largest-canopied bonsai tree of its kind in the country and has been carefully trained into shape since 1890. You can find it at the Sa Dec Bonsai Museum in Dong Thap province.

• The Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida marked the festive season by illuminating two special fig trees planted in 1927. One is a banyan (Ficus benghalensis). The other is a Ficus drupacea. Both are trees that interested Thomas Edison because — like all figs — they produce latex, and he wanted to find plants that could be used to develop rubber plantations in the United States. Today, they are both towering giants.

Fig Pests and Climate

As fig trees face rising temperatures, researchers are beginning to ask how climate change will reshape their relationships with pests.

• Drought may make Ficus microcarpa fig trees more susceptible to their main insect pests — the larvae of moths called Perina nuda, say researchers in China.

• Another major pest of fig trees is the fig mite (Aceria ficus). This species of tiny arachnid not only damages leaves of the edible fig (Ficus carica) trees as it feeds, but also transmits the virus that causes fig mosaic disease. In new research published in December, scientists in Iran showed that the mites reproduce and develop faster as temperatures rise from 22 to 30°C. This suggests that global warming could benefit the mites and significantly reduce fig yield and quality on infected trees.

Planting and Praising Fig Trees in India

• The latest episode of the ‘Jungle Book’ nature series hosted by Samruddhi Kerkar focuses on the banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) and has some great footage of gigantic specimens of this species. The narration is in the Goan language but the visuals are universal. You can watch the video here.

• India’s minister of home affairs Amit Shah says everyone should be planting fig trees. “Everyone should take a pledge to serve nature and plant at least five peepal trees [Ficus religiosa],” he said on 25 December. Shah added that these trees “provide the most oxygen” — a common misconception linked to the way this species can absorb carbon dioxide at night. As regular readers of Planet Ficus will know, there are far better reasons to plant fig trees.

• Several species of wild fig trees feature in reforestation work funded by Volvo Car India, which has announced it is supporting the planting of 20,000 native trees on degraded land in Haryana state. The initiative is part of Volvo’s Reverse Project, which has already planted 35,000 trees on a former dump site in the city of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh state. The project uses Ficus benghalensis, Ficus religiosa, Ficus racemosa and Ficus virens — which will attract and sustain a wide variety of seed dispersing animals.

Figs in Faith and Spirituality

• In Chhattisgarh, India, villagers launched a protective vigil after someone cut branches from their sacred, centuries-old banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis). “Our gods and goddesses dwell in the sacred banyan tree of the village,” said local man Hirdhan Rajwade. “If its branches are felled, where will our gods and goddesses go? How will our lives continue without them?”

• One hundred sacred fig trees (Ficus religiosa) will be planted on a hill near the Bhairavnath Temple in Gudarh in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, according to the state’s deputy chief minister Rajendra Shukla. Planting a Ficus religiosa — also called a peepal tree — in the temple’s grounds, he quoted the Hindu deity Krishna: “Among trees, I am the peepal.”

• I am quoted in this article by Liz Kimbrough about a recent study showing how a taboo against harming strangler fig spirits protects forests in Indonesian Borneo.

• On 29 December, hundreds of Buddhist leaders and devotees gathered at the top of a mountain in Vietnam to enshrine a new statue of the Buddha. The gold-plated statue, on Ba Den mountain in Tay Ninh province, depicts the Buddha holding a fig in one hand, to represent the tree (Ficus religiosa) under which he attained enlightenment. A decades-old living tree of the same species stands alongside the statue.

Creative Minds

• Artisans in Uganda held an annual gathering to showcase the traditional craft of making cloth from the bark of Ficus natalensis fig trees. See also my Planet Ficus story on this useful biomaterial, which has survived a history of suppression by religion, colonialism and war.

• A farmer in Brazil has built a house high above the ground in a huge old fig tree. Working by night after spending each day tending to his tobacco fields, Silvino Kniss had no architectural plans or experience. Instead, he took inspiration from images he found on the internet as he designed the structure, complete with bathroom, living room and balcony.

Medicinal Figs

Three new studies echo a familiar pattern: modern science catching up with medicinal knowledge that communities have long held.

• Researchers in Assam, India showed that an extract of the bark of Ficus racemosa trees can neutralize enzymes in the venom of two of the country’s deadliest snakes: the Indian cobra and Russell’s viper. Local people told the researchers that they have long used the fig species in traditional remedies for snakebites.

• Scientists in Brazil showed that extracts of Ficus citrifolia leaves have significant activity against the mosquito-borne viruses that cause Zika, Chikungunya and Mayaro diseases.

• Researchers in Nigeria showed that extracts of Ficus platyphylla bark increased sexual behaviour in female rats — suggesting that people’s traditional use of the plant as an aphrodisiac is not unreasonable.

  ---

In Case You Missed It

• Here at Planet Ficus, I answered a question I am often asked: Is it true that the figs we eat contain dead wasps?

• I also shared an interview I did a while back with Michael Metivier of Chelsea Green Publishing— which published my book: Gods, Wasps and Stranglers.

Over To You

Do you have a memory, photo, or observation involving fig trees? I’d love to hear from you. Send your story or image to planetficus@substack.com — I’ll feature selected entries in future editions.

Thank you for reading

Thanks for being part of Planet Ficus. If you liked what you read, consider sharing it with someone who might enjoy these stories too — and if you haven’t already, subscribe for future editions. Together we can grow a forest of readers.

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An insect emerges from a hole in one of the figs. She’s so small you could swallow her and not notice. She’s a fig-wasp with an urgent mission and her time is running out. All around her, thousands of her kind are crawling out of figs. Each one is a female with the same quest and each faces immediate danger…

So begins my book’s chapter on fig-wasps — the tiny, stingless insects that fig trees depend on to pollinate their flowers, and which can only breed inside figs.

This 80-million-year-old partnership is a textbook example of species evolving together — most of the 900-plus species of figs rely on their own species of fig-wasps, and vice versa. The action takes place within the figs, the hollow structures in which Ficus species hide their flowers.

The world would be a very different place without fig-wasps. Hundreds of species of wild animals would go hungry, with knock-on effects for the thousands of plant species whose seeds these animals disperse.

Without fig-wasps, there would have been no Ficus religiosa tree for the Buddha to sit beneath as he attained enlightenment. There would have been no fig leaves to protect the modesty of Adam and Eve; no banyan (Ficus benghalensis) to astound Alexander the Great.

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Thanks to fig-wasps, Ficus species and their figs have shaped the world about us and have influenced diverse human cultures in many remarkable ways. The best could be yet to come, as these species can be vital allies in our efforts to restore degraded rainforests.

But when Ben Crair wrote about figs in the New Yorker, what caught the attention of many readers was this line: “When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing fig-wasp mummies, too.”

While that is certainly true of the hundreds of wild fig species, we tend to eat figs of just one species: the domesticated Ficus carica.

This plant is among the first that people ever cultivated for food — several thousand years ago. Over that long history, farmers bred some Ficus carica varieties that no longer need wasps to produce ripe figs. So, for those varieties, there’s no trace of a wasp. Great news for vegans!

Other Ficus carica varieties do need wasps to pollinate their flowers in order for them to develop seeds, and then become sweet and ripe. But as Anna Rothschild explains so well in her Gross Science video, below, the wasps are so small and so few that you really won’t notice them.

What’s more, any fig wasps that don’t depart the fig while it is still on the tree will be broken down by enzymes produced by the fig itself as it ripens. So rest assured, when you bite into a fig, any crunch comes from fig seeds — not wasp corpses.

Thanks for reading. I hope this post has set some minds at ease, and has also introduced new readers to some of the many wonders that spill from the ancient relationship between fig trees and fig-wasps. These species have been dancing together through time since the era of the last giant dinosaurs — they survived the mass extinction that saw off those big beasts, and have been shaping our world ever since. Planet Ficus is where I tell their many stories. If you know someone who might like to enter this world, please spread the word.

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Here’s how the conversation went:

CGP: You’ve written a fascinating book about figs, but your interest in biology started with big animals. How did you end up finding figs and fig-wasps?

MS: What interested me most when I began studying biology at university was how animals and plants behave and interact and influence each other’s fates. But I was definitely more interested in animals than plants, and in big animals more than small ones.

By accident, I ended up studying the whole gamut in the mixed-up biology of fig trees, their pollinator wasps, and seed-dispersing birds and mammals. For my master’s degree’s field project, I was meant to go to Indonesia to study the wild bird trade, but it turned out that the project there needed a social scientist, not a biologist.

My course supervisor felt bad and reached out to three of his fellow fig biologists to see if any could host a project student for six weeks. It was Rhett Harrison, in a rainforest national park in Borneo, who replied first with a yes. The fig trees I studied there soon seduced me. My master’s project turned into a doctoral thesis, and I would spend 18 months in the rainforest over the next three years.

CGP: What do you mean by “mixed-up biology of fig trees.” Can you elaborate?

MS: By mixed-up I mean that the fates of fig trees, fig-wasps, and fig-eating birds and mammal are all bound together. The flowers of each fig tree species can be pollinated only by specific fig-wasp species. The wasps in turn can only breed in their partner’s flowers, which are inside the figs.

Thanks to this 80-million-year-old relationship, more than 1,200 bird and mammal species benefit by feeding on ripe figs. And because of the wasps, ripe figs can be found year-round, sustaining a great variety of wildlife when other fruits are scarce. Most of these animals are seed dispersers, providing a service to the fig trees in return for a payment of fig flesh.

The wasp/fig/wildlife marriage is under constant pressure. Some birds and mammals are enemies of the fig trees, destroying the seeds they consume. There are also parasitic insects that feed on the offspring of pollinator wasps inside their figs.

Overall though, the marriage is strong. It has many children too — not only the new generations of fig trees, fig-wasps and fig-eating animals, but also those of hundreds of other plant species whose seeds the fig-sustained animals disperse. As a result, fig trees and their associated animals shape the world about us, just as they have been doing for tens of millions of years.

CGP: You grew up off the coast of England, so what began your fascination with tropical ecosystems, and what/when was your first encounter with them?

MS: I grew up on Jersey, a very small island in the English Channel, with no rivers, no mountains, no forests. My interest in tropical forests was fed in part by my dad’s love of nature and being outdoors. Under his influence, I also watched a lot of David Attenborough documentaries as a kid.

Another big childhood influence was Jersey Zoo, now Durrell Wildlife Park, and its symbol — the dodo. The writer Gerald Durrell had set the zoo up to breed rare species and restock their wild populations. At a very young age, the zoo taught me about the diversity of life, the wonders of the tropics, and the reality of extinction.

Later when I was a teenager, I began reading New Scientist and started to understand just how important tropical rainforests are, not just for wildlife but for the climate and our wellbeing. The first time I went to the tropics was in 1994, when I visited Sri Lanka with some friends from university. To walk in a tropical forest for the first time was an amazing experience. I was awestruck.

CGP: You clearly identify the ecology and biology of fig trees, but you’ve become fascinated with the role figs have played in human history. What can we learn from these cultural associations and meanings?

MS: The more I learned about wild fig species, the more I came across curious stories in which these trees star. They feature in myths and religious stories from places as varied as Greece, Kenya, Mexico, Egypt, India, and Australia — and many more. The local Iban people who lived near my research site in Borneo said strangler figs were hosts to spirits and so should never be felled.

I later learned that such taboos against felling fig trees are remarkably common to diverse cultures around the world. The more I dug, the more I realized how deep-rooted fig trees are in the human story. They were sustaining, protecting, and inspiring our ancestors long, long ago. Today, thanks to their unique biology, they can help us to restore damaged rainforests and protect rare and endangered wildlife.

Protecting and planting fig trees will help us to safeguard many thousands of other species of plants and animals and the ecological functions they provide. Healthy biodiverse forests can both provide sustainable livelihoods and lock away carbon, slowing climate change. Those ancient cultural taboos against felling fig trees are still relevant today.

CGP: One of the lasting impressions from your book is the surprising ways in which science and spirituality quite naturally intertwine. On a personal level, is there a memory you have from your travels and studies where you experienced the sublimity of these connections?

MS: The first time I walked in a tropical rainforest, in Sri Lanka in 1994, I felt what I can only describe as awe. I viscerally felt the abundance of life all about me. It was as if I could somehow detect it at some deep level within me. To be in a tropical rainforest is to be immersed in a new atmosphere, a different humidity, a new soundscape, and a visual flood of myriad shades of green.

With so much life vibrating in one place, it is hard not to feel some connection to the rhythm. I have had that same sensation many times in Borneo and in the Amazon and in other forests. Part of its power is how it reveals that all life is connected, and how small we are in the greater scheme of life. The sensation is both grounding and enlivening.

Thanks for reading. Planet Ficus is where I will be sharing stories that didn’t make it into the book, as well as all I have learned since writing it. See below for a sample of recent posts — there are many more stories in the pipeline.

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Each month, I’ll bring you stories from around the world that reveal just how extraordinary fig trees are — not just biologically, but culturally, spiritually and artistically.

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In this roundup, you’ll find: strangler figs regenerating a burned forest in Indonesia, plans to restore hornbill habitat with figs in India, conflict over a fig tree in Kenya, the passing of the ‘Mother of Trees’, and grassroots movements defending heritage trees across India.

Let’s dive in.

Nature’s First Responders: Strangler Figs Return to Burned Indonesian Forest

Researchers in Sumatra, Indonesia have uncovered fresh evidence that fig trees are among nature’s most effective forest healers.

Strangler figs typically begin life high on other trees, from seeds deposited there by fruit-eating animals. So Sidiq Purwanto and colleagues were surprised to find many strangler figs growing directly from the ground in open areas of peat-swamp forest that had burned in 2013-14.

In the 3.4 hectares of land that they surveyed, they found 138 strangler figs of ten different Ficus species. The figs made up one-third of all the trees growing there — and 97 percent had germinated on the ground.

That matters because planting trees to restore logged, drained or burned peatland forests is difficult and costly. But naturally regenerating strangler figs will provide year-round food for fruit-eating birds and mammals — the very species that disperse seeds of many forest tree species. The researchers argue that protecting naturally germinating fig trees, and ensuring favourable water levels for them to thrive, could help forests recover faster and at minimal cost.

A Controversial Fig Tree in Kenya

Last month, I brought you a story from Kenya, about plans to cut down two fig trees to end a curse believed to fuel conflict between the Sabaot and Bukusu communities. The story has taken a tense turn.

A meeting convened by Sabaot elders to discuss felling one of the trees — a mukuyu (Ficus sycomorus) in Mount Elgon — had to be abandoned when local youths armed with clubs stormed in. Police fired shots in the air to restore order. The tree’s fate has divided local people. Some say that felling it will bring wealth and development to the region. Others reject superstitious beliefs about the tree.

“Telling us that uprooting mukuyu trees will bring wealth is a total lie,” said Fred Kapondi, the local Member of Parliament. “As environmental champions, we must continue planting trees, and we cannot allow even a single tree to be cut. Let’s enlighten our people on the importance of planting more trees and protecting the indigenous trees.”

The Living Legacy of India’s Mother of Trees

In November, India said farewell to Saalumarada Thimmakka, a famed fig-tree guardian and national inspiration. Thimmakka, who lived to 114, planted and cared for hundreds of banyan trees (Ficus benghalensis) along a dusty road in Karnataka state. Over her life, she planted thousands of trees, loving them as if they were her children. I wrote a short account of her life and legacy here at Planet Ficus.

Activists Assemble: Heritage Fig Trees Rally Support Across India

Grassroots defenders of India’s old fig trees are celebrating — and mobilizing. In Telangana, activists recently won a landmark legal judgment ensuring that a road-widening project must protect a century-old avenue of banyan trees (Ficus benghalensis). Their success — see the full story below — shows that infrastructure and ancient trees need not be enemies.

But other battles are just beginning. In Tamil Nadu, where another planned road expansion threatens old banyans and sacred figs (Ficus religiosa), a nongovernmental organization has petitioned the government to change the plans.

And in Nashik, in the state of Maharashtra, local people are protesting plans to fell 1,700 trees —including three species of figs: Ficus benghalensis, Ficus religiosa and Ficus racemosa — to create temporary housing for religious leaders during the 2026-27 Kumbh Mela festival.

Actor and politician Sayaji Shinde has joined the campaign. Speaking at a protest on 29 November, he said: “We will not allow a single tree to be cut here… 500-600 species depend on this large banyan tree... There is no forgiveness if such trees are cut.”

Help For Hornbills: Figs Feed the Forest’s Great Gardeners

In India, fig trees will play a central role in a new push to conserve hornbills, large birds that disperse the seeds of many tropical forest trees.

Asha Prakash reports that the country’s first ‘centre of excellence’ for hornbill conservation will soon open near Attakatti in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in the state of Tamil Nadu — which is home to four hornbill species, including the iconic great hornbill pictured below.

Because strangler figs are a crucial food source for these birds, the centre will map wild fig trees to inform land-management decisions. It will also raise young fig trees in a nursery and plant them to restore degraded forest land.

It is great to see plans to protect not only species but also the critical relationships between them. Supporting figs means supporting hornbills and all the trees they help to plant.

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In 2016, Tim Laman won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award for an image that feels almost impossible: an orangutan scaling the pillar root of a strangler fig (Ficus stupenda) in Indonesian Borneo, to feast on ripe figs 30 metres high in the rainforest canopy.

There is a sweet irony to Laman’s win. It was another image of an orangutan that had set Laman on his path toward Indonesia and its fig trees.

Back in 1986, while studying for a PhD in neuroscience and animal behaviour at Harvard University, Laman spotted a poster advertising a research assistant’s job in Borneo. The poster featured an illustration (below) from The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution, and Laman’s future hero.

Laman got the job, put his studies on hold, and flew to Borneo. There, he fell in love with the rainforest, and his life tilted in an entirely new direction. For the next few years, he immersed himself in the ecology of strangler figs — the keystone trees whose figs sustain orangutans and dozens of other species, and which start in life as seeds dropped high into the crowns of other trees.

To understand these plants, Laman had to climb. Hauling himself up into the canopy on rope rigs, he found not only his research subject but also his true vocation: documenting the secret lives of rainforest animals from above the forest floor.

One early obsession was hornbills — the spectacular birds that are major seed dispersers for strangler figs and many other tree species. Tracking and photographing them sharpened the skills that would one day bring global acclaim.

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I’m doubly grateful to Tim. His meticulous research on strangler figs informed my own doctoral work on these plants. Years later, when I wrote my book about fig trees, Gods, Wasps and Stranglers, he generously shared insights.

In the decade since he won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, Laman has won many other prizes for his images of rainforest life. Today, his work includes collaborations with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Center for Conservation Media, such as the short film below that was released online in November 2025.

It follows Tim and conservation biologist Yoki Hadiprakrasa to Papua, in eastern Indonesia, where they capture never-before-seen footage of the world’s largest known aggregations of hornbills.

“123 hornbills at this tiny island. That’s crazy!” Tim says in the film, his excitement uncontained.

Every year, each of those hornbills will disperse tens of thousands of seeds into the surrounding forests — especially seeds of strangler figs that they feed on all year round. For millions of years, fig trees and hornbills have shaped each other’s destinies. Yet in many places today, the trees and the birds are in decline. Conserving them both means protecting an ancient partnership and the countless other forest species that depend on it.

Thanks to researchers and storytellers like Tim Laman, we can better understand what these relationships mean, and what we stand to lose.

To see more of Laman’s work, visit his Facebook and Instagram pages, or his website. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. For more details of the awards, visit the website.

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