Brazil Nut
Bertholletia excelsa · Lecythidaceae · 브라질넛
Look
- Leaves
- Leaves cluster at the branch tips; the blade is long-elliptic (17 to 36 x 6.5 to 15.4 cm), hairless, with the two sides differing in color.
- Flowers
- Pale yellow to white flowers have six petals, and the stamens form a hood curved to one side, bilaterally symmetric; the outside of the hood is white at the base and yellow toward the tip.
- Fruit
- A mostly round woody fruit (10 to 12.5 cm across, up to 16 cm) falls to the ground whole with the seeds inside; the lid (operculum, 1.5 to 2 cm across) falls inward into the fruit when it opens. Each fruit has 10 to 25 seeds, dark brown, with a bony seed coat 2 to 3 mm thick.
- Bark
- The trunk has no buttress roots; the bark is vertically fissured, with a thick outer bark and a thick, reddish inner bark.
Where it grows
- Native to
- Found in the Amazon region of Guyana, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia.
- Ecology
- Prefers terra firme (non-flooded) forest and grows only where the dry season lasts 3 to 5 months. Only large bees of the genera Bombus, Centris, Epicharis, Eulaema and Xylocopa pollinate it efficiently, and agoutis and acouchis disperse the seeds. It flowers from September, near the end of the rainy season, to February, and fruit mostly falls in January to February.