Chances are, you’ve heard of fig trees before; beyond producing fruit, you can find fig trees woven into several different cultures, pieces of art, and works of literature. Given their prominence, you might be wondering what exactly makes these trees so special. Lucky for you, we have the inside scoop on everything fig-related.
Here are 10 Fascinating Fig Facts to pique your interest:
There are over 750 known Ficus species in the world, native all across the globe.
Nearly every species of fig tree is pollinated by its own distinct species of fig wasp, each a fascinating example of co-evolution.
Although the average female fig wasp is less than two millimeters long, she must often travel tens of kilometers in less than 48 hours to lay her eggs in another fig—a truly heroic journey!
Fig trees are keystone species in many rainforests, producing fruit year round that are important food sources for thousands of animal species from bats to monkeys to birds.
Fig tree flowers are actually hidden inside the fruit, which led many early cultures to believe the plants to be flowerless.
Figs have played prominent roles in every major modern religion, including Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.
Some fig species are trees, others are vines, shrubs, and even epiphytes.
Female rhinoceros hornbills are sealed into the hollow trunks of trees to brood by their male partners, who also deliver them figs to eat through narrow crevices.
Strangler figs grow their roots downward from the tops of their host trees ultimately killing and replacing them.
A banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) can resemble a small forest thanks to the false trunks grown from its aerial prop roots. The largest one on record is growing in India and spans more than four acres.
Trees of Life, Trees of Knowledge
Ficus species exemplify variation—that key trait Wallace identified as enabling evolution. And so they should. Every day for the past 80 million years, fig trees around the world have been combining their DNA and packing it into trillions upon trillions of seeds. Thus, they have tested a staggering number of genetic combinations, each one an experiment in the struggle for existence. It’s a struggle fig trees make look easy.
Not only did these plants survive the cataclysm that saw off the giant dinosaurs and many other species. They flourished. As they spread around the globe, they formed hundreds of new species and became the most varied group of plants on the planet. The side effects have been profound. These plants fed our pre-human ancestors and offered other gifts to the creators of the first great civilisations. Our predecessors rewarded these trees with roles in some of the oldest of our stories.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all agree, for instance, that figs trees have been part of the human tale since Day One. In the creation story these three religions share, a fig tree was present in the Garden of Eden along with the first people, whom English speakers call Adam and Eve. God had given the couple all they needed and the freedom to do what they liked, but with one proviso—they must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In Western Europe, we are often told that this fruit was an apple. However, this may simply be because of the Latin bibles that began to spread in the Middle Ages—although they sound different, the Latin nouns for an apple and evil are the same: malum. Some Jewish rabbis have concluded that the forbidden fruit was in fact a fig. It was a fig that Michelangelo portrayed when he painted the scene on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel in about 1510.
Eve and Adam eat figs from the Tree of Knowledge, in an image first drawn by a Spanish monk in the year 994. The story says Eve ignored God’s rule and swallowed the fruit. Adam followed suit. They were suddenly aware of their nudity. According to the book of Genesis: ‘The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.’ A fig tree had come to the rescue, but Adam and Eve’s lack of clothes was the least of their problems. God banished them from the Garden of Eden, so preventing them from eating the fruit of the Tree of Life and gaining immortality. This, these three religions agree, is where all of our promise and our problems began.
Like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I heard the story of Adam and Eve at a very young age. Decades later, and after years of studying the biology of fig trees, the story took on new meaning when I started to learn how fig trees were central to other creation stories too. I learned about Mithra, a Persian deity and ‘Judge of Souls’. Some versions of his story say he was born out of a rock beneath a sacred fig tree. Naked and hungry, Mithra hid himself from the howling wind in the branches of the tree, ate figs for his first meal and made himself garments from fig leaves.
Then I heard about creation stories from thousands of kilometres away in Africa’s Congo Basin. They describe how the first hunter was born from a species of fig tree. Cold and naked, he peeled the tree’s bark away and fashioned clothing.
Nations has classified the process they use as a ‘masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity’. Researchers and designers around the world now put the material to new uses, in everything from furniture and high fashion to yachts, cars and aircraft.
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10 Fascinating Fig Facts