African Baobab

The African baobab (Adansonia digitata) is a massive tree of the African savanna with a swollen trunk that stores water. It can live for over a thousand years and is often called the upside-down tree because its bare branches resemble roots.

🧬 Field Guide Specimen: Open African Baobab in the CRV Science Field Guide to log the specimen, see its place among the Diaphoretickes lineages in the Cladogram Explorer, and test your recall in the Red List conservation game.

The spongy wood of the trunk holds huge amounts of water, which the tree uses during the long dry season, when it drops its leaves. Large trunks can be tens of meters in circumference.

Radiocarbon dating showed that some baobabs are more than 2,000 years old. Since 2005, many of the oldest and largest African baobabs have died or lost major stems, possibly related to climate change, although the cause is uncertain. See Climate change.

Large white flowers open at night and are pollinated by bats and hawkmoths. The fruit pulp is rich in vitamin C and is marketed as a superfruit, and the tree provides fiber, food and shelter for communities.

• Climate change — drought and tree mortality
• Large Flying Fox — a bat that pollinates trees
• Socotra Dragon Tree — another distinctive tree of arid lands