Wednesday, June 22, 2011

FAQ: what's a baobab?

Actually that doesn't happen "frequently" but a neighbour did ask me "what's a baobab."

What's a baobab??? Who doesn't know what a baobab is?

This is a baobab:


See the tiny trees? Those are regular-size trees. The two big trees are baobabs.


They can grow something like 50 m tall. That's about as tall as the 16-story building where I live. So a baobab is a VERY large tree.

Now look:


An infestation of baobabs. Is this what I've unleashed on my unsuspecting little village?

These are baobab flowers:


I didn't even know baobabs had flowers until I watched this documentary. Obviously they do, but you just don't think about these things. Baobab flowers are a foot long.

And these are mouse lemurs:





They live in cavities in the baobabs and eat the nectar from the flowers, and the bugs that pollinate it. The scientific part of my brain knows that lemurs do not grow from baobab seeds and that there will not be any lemurs in my trees. The other 99% of my brain can't wait for our baobabs to start producing lemurs.

So, now you know. All these images are screen captures from the BBC documentary Planet Earth, episode Seasonal Forests, used without any kind of permission, implied or expressed.

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