Nature is ruthless and cruel. It is a silent, unscrupulous killer. Whether through animals or plants, the pattern is always the same: survival is its ultimate goal. So it doesn’t matter who gets in its way it will do anything to live and to ensure its creatures survive.
And that’s the big difference from us humans, who love ourselves so much. It’s not like that with plants, and even less so with animals. They only look for food, shelter, and ways to protect their species.
Well, here you have a couple of seedlings that have evolved to become first-class killers. What you see here is a matapalo tree, which is a tree about 10 to 15 meters tall. But its unmatched characteristic is that it doesn’t grow in the ground. Yes, you read that right the tree spends most of its existence on the top, in the canopy of other species.
Its seeds are scattered by insects and birds through the skies and fall on other small trees. And then, slowly, you see it: a giant tree suddenly has a tiny, harmless little green leaf on its branches. Imperceptible in most cases. No one would think anything bad of it.
But there it appears, little by little. It enters the tree and begins its process of slow, very slow growth. It takes its strength from the trunk of the big tree, living at the other’s expense. It grows bigger while the great tree can do absolutely nothing, nothing, except suffer and watch as its cursed guest consumes it little by little. At first it’s very slow, but then it advances at an incredible speed, while it destroys, crushes, and siphons all the energy from the great tree, its unwilling host.
And something very important: it doesn’t matter how hard the tree is. Here we have a palm tree of incredible hardness, and it has already been invaded by these roots. Little by little they will invade the entire tree until they wrap around it and make it disappear completely. The important thing is that there will always be a tree there, but it will no longer be the noble palm tree that the space was meant for.
So, my friends, nature will do anything to survive just like us humans, who are destroying the entire planet in the name of surviving better. But we don’t realize that we’re killing each other.
Thank you for coming.
