Ficus Dammaropsis For Sale, Care and Growth Rate Info.

 Photo Credits: @BigLeafBoutique on Instagram 

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The Ficus Dammaropsis is one of the most striking tropical plants in landscapes. The plant grows like somewhat of a giant bush that can get up to 25 ft tall and wide. The leaves can get a large as 3ft long with distinct red veins along the leaves. In our pursuit of this plant, we spent some time studying the plant and discovered some truly astonishing facts that make this plant so unique and rare.

What Makes the Ficus Dammaropsis Fig So Unique and Rare?

The Ficus Dammaropsis Fig also known as Pupua New Guinea Fig Tree has a unique form of fertilization, each species relying on a single, highly specialized species of wasp that is itself totally dependent upon that fig species in order to breed. The trees produce three types of flower; male, a long-styled female and a short-styled female flower, often called the gall flower. All three types of flower are contained within the structure we usually refer to as the fruit or fig. 

The male flower produce pollen and the female flowers produce seeds. The female flowers of this species are pollinated by only by a  Ceratosolen abnormis wasp.

The female fig wasp enters a fig and lays its eggs on the short styled female flowers while pollinating the long styled female flowers. Wingless male fig wasps emerge first, inseminate the emerging females and then bore exit tunnels out of the fig for the winged females. Females emerge, collect pollen from the male flowers and fly off in search of figs whose female flowers are receptive. In order to support a population of its pollinator, individuals of a Ficus spp. must flower asynchronously. A population must exceed a critical minimum size to ensure that at any time of the year at least some plants have overlap of emmission and reception of fig wasps. Without this temporal overlap the short-lived pollinator wasps will go locally extinct.