The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Piper cenocladum is a tropical rainforest shrub from Costa Rica and nearby countries, known as an ant plant because its hollow stems house ants that protect it. It needs warm, humid, shaded conditions and moist soil to thrive.
Piper cenocladum is a species of shrub in the genus Piper (pepper plants). This plant and a few other closely related species are known as ant plants or ant pipers. P. cenocladum has broad, bright green leaves and grows in dim, swampy areas deep in the rainforest of Costa Rica and surrounding countries. It occurs in the rainforest understory.
The species is a myrmecophyte, a plant that lives in ecological mutualism with ants. It has hollow petioles which provide a home for ants, especially of the species Pheidole bicornis. The ants also use the plant as their main food source and defend it against predation by herbivorous caterpillars and fungi.
Piper abajoense · Piper abalienatum · Piper achupallasense · Higuillo de hoja menuda · Piper angamarcanum · Vera cruz pepper · Piper azuaiense · Piper baezanum · Piper baezense · Piper begoniiforme · Betel · Madagascan Wild Pepper
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Piper cenocladum by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
