Tree Love, its not true love

If you have driven along the scenic East Coast Road from Chennai towards Mamallapuram (aka Mahabalipuram) you may have noticed a peculiar phenomenon of the Palmyrah tree growing through a Banyan tree - several instance of the monocot growing through this dicot can be seen all along the way to the temple town. It almost seems to suggest some form of symbiotic relationship between the two species. A kind of give-and-take relationship between the two completely different plant species.

For years I tried to understand the relationship between the two plants and even asked several botanists of repute about this phenomenon and nobody could quite give me an explanation.
It was only recently that I chanced upon the answer to this botanical riddle while watching a crow eat the fruit of the banyan tree on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. The crow sat on one of the leaves of a young palmyrah tree and tried to prise open with its beak a bright red, ripe banyan fruit - a part of the open fruit dropped from the crows beak and rolled down the sloping leaf, towards the palmyrah trunk and lodged in the ample axil of the palmyrah leaf. The axil of the palmyrah leaf is deep and can hold a substantial amount of water and other plant debris which, overtime, rots and provides a fertile seeding ground for the several seeds in the banyan fruit. The seeds germinate in the axil of the young palmyrah and the roots begin to grow out of the axil and downwards towards the soil while the palm grows towards the sun. Soon the banyan roots reach the ground and draw enough sustenance from the soil to allow the banyan to grow rapidly upwards and claim its share of the sun's energy.

Here is a case of a purely physical relationship between two plants where one plant actually gets its initial sustenance from another and eventually takes over and outgrows and even smothers the nurturer, in time! Who said life is fair?