Fruit of the Autograph tree / Clusia rosea, Tobago

Just adding five extra shots late this evening, when I would guess that a lot of people are not on Flickr - especially with Bad, bad, Panda being a real pain! - and then will add my five photos for tomorrow sometime tomorrow morning. Can't believe I am still only on the first day's worth of photos, taken mainly around the Blue Waters Inn that my friends and I stayed at mid-March 2017. I will be glad when I can add some different birds! Haven't got all that many images from Day 1 left to post, and then I can share photos from a trip we did to the main ridge of Tobago, on Day 2.

This was one of my favourite new things to see on my recent trip with friends to Trinidad & Tobago. I found the beauty of this fruit to be quite stunning when it has split open. This photo shows what it looks like before it splits. We also came across one that had fallen to the ground when we were on a walk in the rain forest. For a split second, it made my heart race, as it looked so much like some wonderful species of Earthstar fungus, lol! I took closer views of the one on the ground and will post later. This was taken on 14 March, our second day on Tobago, when we were taken by a guide for a drive on the island, with a picnic lunch (sandwiches) and a very muddy walk in the rain forest. Amazingly, it had been arranged that a man would be there with the back of his truck full of rubber boots that we could rent - and how grateful we were that we now had what turned out to be much-needed footwear.

"Clusia rosea (syn. c major), the autograph tree, also known as copey, balsam apple, pitch-apple, and Scotch attorney, is a tropical and sub-tropical plant species in the genus Clusia. It is a hemiepiphyte, that is, it grows as an epiphyte on rocks or other trees at the start of its life and resembles a strangling fig (Ficus). Just as a strangling fig it overgrows and strangles its host tree with its many aerial roots. It has become a great threat to Sri Lanka, Hawaii, and many other tropical countries as an invasive plant. The flowers are white. The upper leaf tissue registers 'writing' giving it the common name autograph tree. The tree produces a fleshy, light green but poisonous fruit; once the fruit has split, the seeds are favored by birds and other wildlife." From Wikipedia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusia_major