Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)

node · earth · Amazon Basin, most abundant in Bolivia, Brazil and Peru

An emergent canopy tree of the Lecythidaceae, reaching around fifty metres and living for centuries, and the clearest single case of why the Amazon cannot be replaced with a plantation of itself. Its flower has a hooded lip that only a large, strong bee can force open, so pollination depends on populations of long-distance-foraging bees that themselves need continuous forest. Its fruit is a woody capsule the size of a grapefruit and hard enough that essentially one animal opens it: the agouti, a rodent with incisors equal to the task, which buries surplus seeds and fails to recover some of them. Remove the bees and the tree sets no fruit; remove the agoutis and the seeds never leave the parent tree's shadow. This is why almost the entire world supply is still gathered from wild trees in standing forest rather than farmed, and why the species is treated as a demonstration that some economic products of the Amazon are conditional on the forest remaining a forest. Peres and colleagues showed in 2003 that heavily harvested stands were missing their juveniles altogether - producing well today and structurally doomed, on a delay measured in human generations.