Boy inside a giant strangler fig, (Ficus aurea); La Amistad National Park, Costa Rica. The host tree is dead and decomposed, so the central core is hollow; such a strangler is known as a "columnar tree" - but the fig tree remains. These trees are hemiepiphytic because they start as epiphytes high in a host but their roots grow down to the soil and the strangler then surrounds its host.