Lantana camara produces a berry that looks edible, smells faintly sweet, and is mildly toxic to most mammals. That detail captures the plant's entire strategy: it offers just enough to get dispersed, and then it poisons the competition. Brought to India by the British as a hedge ornamental in the 1800s, it has since colonised an estimated five to seven million hectares of forest, with tiger reserves bearing a disproportionate share of that burden.
