Strangler trees germinate and grow on other trees, eventually enveloping and potentially even girdling their hosts.
If stranglers can themselves host other strangler trees, they may not even seem to need non-stranglers to persist.
Yet despite their high fitness potential, strangler trees neither dominate the communities in which they occur nor is the strategy particularly common outside of figs (genus Ficus).
This allows us to highlight parallels between the invasion fitness of strangler trees arising from commensalist ancestors, and cases where strangling can arise in concert with the evolution of hemiepiphytism among free-standing ancestors.
Six-foot-tall leafed philodendrons, gigantic palm trees and strangler fig trees populated the rainforest; the bright red passion flowers added a wonderful contrast.
At Maquis (Avenue de l'Université; 257-22-251-171), an American-style bar and grill on the outskirts of the bustling Bwiza district, juicy steaks and brochettes are served in an attractive outdoor setting beneath the boughs of a towering strangler fig tree.
It commonly occurs in the strangler fig tree (Ficus sp ., provided the epiphytic growth of its several food plants are present.
Perched in the canopy like an Ewok village, Jungle Hotel Paksong is the Treetop Explorer's hub: six open-sided treehouses containing basic but comfortable en suite bedrooms, each cradled in the coils of strangler fig trees up to 20m off the ground.
Plants and animals that live nowhere else in America thrive in abundance – from strangler fig trees to the elusive Florida panther.
Top Spots If you visit the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, for example, a guide can help search for the emerald-green Quetzal, a rare bird that often hides among the towering strangler fig trees there.
Most of the visitors come to watch Mamiraua's array of birds, uakari monkeys, or pink river dolphins that forage among flooded kapok trees and strangler figs.
