Ecotourism isn’t just about endangered, big-name species, it’s also about plants and animals that may not be immediately threatened but contribute to complex habitats and indelible visitor impressions and experience. Consider the strangler fig tree of the Costa Rica rainforest, found in many parts of the country, including the Nicoya Peninsula, accessible by air on flights from the capital, San Jose Costa Rica and Tamarindo Costa Rica, among other towns with commercial airports.

 
If strangler fig trees lived in my native England, oh what a happy childhood I would have had! Such bizarre twisted forms, full of caverns and convolutions — perfect for climbing and other boyhood adventures.

However, strangler fig trees do not grow in Europe, or anywhere else outside of the tropics, so now I make up for my lost childhood experiences by scrabbling around on them whenever I get the chance to here in the Costa Rica rainforest.

Like magical unearthly things, conjured from the minds of Lewis Carroll or J. R. R. Tolkien, strangler fig trees in the Costa Rica rainforest appear to be something more than mere trees. Folkloric legends abound of witches, ghosts, gods and monsters dwelling within their tortured trunks. Demons aside, they truly are weird and wonderful life forms, boasting a truly weird and wonderful lifestyle to match.

Most “normal” trees begin their lives from the forest floor, growing upward toward the sun and sky, but matapalos, as strangler fig trees are called is Spanish, have abandoned tradition; instead, they grow “down.”

The name means “tree killer,” a descriptive title if ever there was one, for every strangler fig tree has taken the life of another stately giant so that it may itself exist.

These behemoths weigh a hundred tons or more, germinate from a minuscule seed, doing so in the highest reaches of the canopy, an unusual place for a tree to begin growing. After eating ripe fruit from the tree,, monkeys, bats and birds carry the seeds in their stomachs, eventually eliminating them somewhere high above the forest floor.

Atop a tree, embedded in its own little compost garden with access to direct sunlight, a new strangler fig tree germinates . Tendrils snake down, engulfing an unwilling host in a sinister embrace. Death, which scientists believe is due to extreme shading rather than actual “strangulation,” may take a hundred years, but the victim’s fate is usually inescapable..

Eventually the host rots away completely, leaving nothing more than a hollow tube running through the heart of the now mighty strangler fig tree.

Despite their malevolent origins, strangler fig trees are marvelous and important additions to any the Costa Rica rainforest, as can be seen in rainforests near Tambor and Tamarindo, Costa Rica. Their fruit satisfies  thousands of hungry bellies while their trellised branches offer sanctuary to a multitude ofcreatures.

Perhaps more important, at least as far as I’m concerned,  strangler fig trees exist primarily to bring out the adventurer, the imaginer, the monkey and the child that resides in every one of us.