Kapok | Tree, Fiber, Pollination, Sustainable, & Facts | Britannica (original) (raw)

Also called:

Java cotton, ceiba, or Java kapok

kapok, (Ceiba pentandra), gigantic tropical tree and the seed-hair fibers obtained from its fruit. Common throughout the tropics, the kapok is native to the New World and to Africa and was transported to Asia, where it is cultivated for its fiber, or floss. See also list of plant fibers.

Physical description

The kapok’s huge buttressed trunk tapers upward to an almost horizontal, spreading crown where large, compound leaves are made up of five to eight long, narrow leaflets. In full sun, the kapok can grow up to 4 meters (13 feet) per year, eventually reaching a height of 50 meters (164 feet).

Bat pollinationA common fruit bat pollinating the flowers of kapok (Ceiba pentandra).

The kapok is deciduous, dropping its foliage after seasonal rainy periods. Flowering occurs when the tree is leafless, thereby improving access for the bats that feed on the sugar-laden nectar of kapok blossoms. In doing so, the bats unwittingly pollinate the tree’s flowers. The flowers open at night and have five petals that are white or pink on the outside. Only a few flowers on a given branch will open on any particular night during the two or three weeks that the tree blooms.

Kapoks do not bloom every year, and some may go 5–10 years without flowering. When the tree does bloom, however, it is prolific, producing up to 4,000 fruits measuring up to 15 cm (6 inches) long. Eventually these pods open on the tree, exposing the pale kapok fibers to the wind for dispersal. The fibers, in which over 200 seeds are loosely embedded, is sometimes referred to as silk cotton and is yellowish brown, lightweight, and lustrous.

Fiber and uses

Floss-filled podsKapok tree (Ceiba pentandra) covered in pods filled silky kapok fibers.

In harvesting kapok fiber, the pods are either cut down or gathered when they fall, then broken open with mallets. The seed and fiber, removed from the pods by hand, are stirred in a basket; the seeds fall to the bottom, leaving the fibers free. The seeds may be processed to obtain oil for making soap, and the residue is used as fertilizer and cattle feed.

Kapok fibersWoolly seeds produced by the seed pods of the kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra).

Individual fibers are 0.8 to 3.2 cm (0.3 to 1.25 inches) long, averaging 1.8 cm (0.7 inch), with diameters of 30 to 36 micrometers (a micrometer is about 0.00004 inch). Kapok is a moisture-resistant, quick-drying, resilient, and buoyant fiber. The fibers contain both lignin, a woody plant substance, and cellulose, a carbohydrate. The inelastic fiber, or floss, is too brittle for spinning, but it weighs only one-eighth as much as cotton.

The floss has been used in life preservers and other water-safety equipment, supporting as much as 30 times its own weight in water. Buoyancy is lost slowly, with one test showing only 10 percent loss after 30 days of water immersion. Kapok is also used as stuffing for pillows, mattresses, and upholstery, as insulation material, and as a substitute for absorbent cotton in surgery. Kapok is chiefly cultivated in Asia and Indonesia; the floss is an important product of Java. It is highly flammable, however, and the fiber’s importance has decreased with the development of foam rubber, plastics, and synthetic fibers.

Although kapok wood does not hold screws or nails well, the timber is used for a variety of wood products, including paper. Local peoples have long used kapok logs for carving into canoes.

Indian kapok, floss from the simal cotton tree (Bombax malabarica), native to India, has many of the qualities of the Java type but is more brownish yellow in color and less resilient. Immersed in water, it supports only 10 to 15 times its own weight.

All these trees are members of the hibiscus, or mallow, family (Malvaceae), some members of which produce tree cotton (bombax cotton) in Brazil and the West Indies, and to which cotton itself also belongs. The genus name of the Java kapok, Ceiba, is thought to be derived from a Carib word for a dugout boat.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Melissa Petruzzello.