Ficus aurea, commonly known as the Florida strangler fig, golden fig, or higuerón, is a tree in the family Moraceae. It is native to the U.S. state of Florida, the northern and western Caribbean, southern Mexico and Central America south to Panama. It was first described in 1846 by English botanists Thomas Nuttall and Philip Miller.
About Ficus aurea in brief
Ficus aurea, commonly known as the Florida strangler fig, golden fig, or higuerón, is a tree in the family Moraceae. It is native to the U.S. state of Florida, the northern and western Caribbean, southern Mexico and Central America south to Panama. Thomas Nuttall described the species in the second volume of his 1846 work The North American Sylva with specific epithet a Aurea. In 1768, Scottish botanist Philip Miller described Ficus maxima, citing Carl Linnaeus’ Hortus Cliffortianus and Hans Sloane’s Catalogus plantarum quæ in insula Jamaica. Under the rules of botanicalclature, Miller’s F. maxima has priority over F. aureA. In 1914, William Fawcett and Alfred Barton Rendle linked Sloan’s illustration to the tree that was then known as Ficus suffocans, a name that had been assigned to it in Augustise’s Flora of the Indian Islands. Since this use has become widespread, the name Ficusmaxima was used in the 1960s for the species that is now conserved in Panama. The tree provides habitat, food and shelter for a host of tropical lifeforms including epiphytes in cloud forests and birds, mammals, reptiles and invertebrates. It has paired figs which are green when unripe, turning yellow as they ripen. The size and shape of the leaves is variable, with some plants having leaves that are usually less than 10 cm long while others have leaves that were larger.
Ficus is one of the largest angiosperm genera and is classified in the subgenus Urostigma and the section Americana. It may reach heights of 30 m. It is monoecious: each tree bears functional male and female flowers. The species is used in traditional medicine, for live fencing, as an ornamental and as a bonsai. It can be found in Florida and in parts of northern Mesoamerica, where figs are borne on short stalks known as peduncles. In the Caribbean, it is found in the northern part of the island of Hispaniola and in the southern parts of the Cayman Islands, where it can be seen in the form of a small tree known as a “cayman fig” The species can grow as high as 30 metres (70 ft) in height and is a member of the family Ficus. It also has a mutualism with fig wasps: figs only pollinated by Fig wasps, and fig wasPs can only reproduce in fig flowers. It was first described in 1846 by English botanists ThomasNuttall who described it as a species of Ficus aurea and Ficus maxima in 1768. The genus Ficus has more than 750 species, with about 750 species in existence.
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This page is based on the article Ficus aurea published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
