HuacapuMinquartia guianensis

Did you know?

• Termites leave huacapu wood alone. Researchers put its resistance down largely to the wood's great density^{[2, 3]}.

• As an old tree grows, its trunk becomes deeply grooved and then pierced right through with holes, like a lattice window^{[2, 3, 4]}.

• It grows very slowly. Mature trees widen by only a millimeter or so a year, and a large trunk can be centuries old^{[2, 3]}.

• Huacapu is the only species in its genus: there is no other Minquartia^[1].

• Chemists named an unusual plant compound after the tree: minquartynoic acid^{[6, 7]}.

• Its small fruits are edible, and birds and small mammals eat them too, carrying the seeds through the forest^{[2, 3, 12]}.

Origins and history

Huacapu is a tree of the rainforest canopy. It grows up to 25 to 30 meters (80 to 95 feet) tall on a straight, upright trunk^{[2, 3, 4]}. When the bark is cut it gives a white latex^[4]. Its fruit is a small, egg-shaped drupe about an inch long with a single seed, blackish when ripe^{[2, 12]}. The French botanist Jean Baptiste Aublet described the species in 1775, in his account of the plants of French Guiana^{[1, 10]}. In Peru it grows in the Amazonian regions of Amazonas, San Martín, Loreto, Ucayali, Huánuco, Pasco and Madre de Dios^[12].

The tree's names change from country to country. It is huacapú in Peru, acariquara in Brazil, manú negro in Costa Rica, guayacán negro in Ecuador, and manwood in Guyana and Panama^{[2, 5, 6, 10, 11]}. Its wood is dense and very heavy, and it resists termites and rot^{[2, 3, 4]}. Those qualities made it the builder's choice. Huacapu is cut for house frames, stakes, fence posts, utility poles and railway sleepers^{[2, 3, 4]}. In the Peruvian Amazon it is especially prized for building traditional homes, because it lasts so long^{[2, 12]}.

Traditional uses

Clinical studies of huacapu in people are still few, but the tree has a long place in Amazonian daily life, both as timber and as a folk herb.

• A bark of Amazonian folk tradition

  The bark and leaves have long been used in folk practice by communities in Peru and northern Brazil, where the tree is still valued this way today^{[2, 3, 5]}.

• Joint comfort

  In the Peruvian Amazon the bark is traditionally left to steep in cane spirit, sweetened with wild honey, and sipped as a tonic for the joints. Huacapu supports joint comfort.*^[12]

• The builder's post

  Huacapu is the traditional timber for the posts and pilings that hold up riverside homes, chosen because it stands for decades in the ground^{[2, 3, 4]}.

• Food for people and wildlife

  Its small fruits are edible, and they feed birds and small mammals, which spread the seeds and help the next generation of trees take root^{[2, 3, 12]}.

Plant compounds

Huacapu contains triterpenes, a class of plant compounds that includes lupeol, taraxerol and lupenone, found in its leaves^{[6, 7, 8]}. It is also the source of minquartynoic acid, a rare acetylenic fatty acid named after the tree^{[6, 7]}. Its leaves contain tannins and other phenolic compounds^{[5, 9]}.