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Ficus mollis
Moraceae FAMILY

Ficus mollis

Ficus mollis

Edibility
0/5
Medicinal
2/5

Safety & Hazards

None known

Cultivation Details

HabitTree
Growth—

Fig trees have a unique form of fertilization, each species relying on a single, highly specialized species of wasp that is itself totaly dependant 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 think of as the fruit. 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[1].

Propagation

Seed - Cite as: Tropical Plants Database, Ken Fern. tropical.theferns.info. 2026-02-20. <tropical.theferns.info/viewtropical.php?id=Ficus+mollis>

Pollinators

Wasps

References

  1. [1]Global Invasive Species Database — http://www.issg.org/database/welcome/ ↩︎Very detailed information on almost 400 species (with more being added) of plants that have become weeds in areas outside their native range.
  2. [2]Flowers of India — http://www.flowersofindia.net/ ↩︎A wed site of native Indian plants, plus cultivated and naturalized species. It has good quality photos and terse details on more than 3,000 species and cultivars.
  3. [3]A Manual of Indian Timbers. — Gamble. J. S. · Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh · 1972 · ISBN - ↩︎First written in the 19th century, but still a classic, giving a lot of information on the uses and habitats of Indian trees. Not for the casual reader.
  4. [4]Medicinal Plants Used by Chakma Tribe in Hill Tracts Districts of Bangladesh. — Rahman M.A.; Uddin S.B.; Wilcock C.C. · Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge. · 2007 Vol 6(3) ↩︎Brief details of medicinal plants used by the Chakma tribe.
  5. [5]Ethnobotany of the Valaiyans of Karandamalai, Dindigul District, Tamil Nadu, India. — Kottaimuthu. R. · The Berkeley Electronic Press · 2008 · http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/ebl ↩︎Terse information on the medicinal uses of plants by a tribe of people in southern India. It can be downloaded from the Internet.