Bush coconut

The Bush coconut, or bloodwood apple, is an Australian bush tucker food, often eaten by Indigenous people of Central Australia.

A Bush coconut

The bush coconut is, in fact, a combination of plant and animal: an adult female scale insect, Cystococcus pomiformis, lives in a gall induced on a bloodwood eucalypt (Corymbia terminalis).[1]

The gall looks like a small, knobbly woody fruit, ranging in size from a golf ball to a tennis ball, with a milky white flesh inside upon which the insect and its male offspring feed.[2]

Bush coconut is called Merne arrkirlpangkwerle in the Arrernte language of Central Australia. The gall is picked and then cracked open with a rock. The Arrernte call the insect angure.

The bush coconut is commonly found in the savannah woodlands of northern Australia, but populations were recently discovered in Brisbane.[3]