These are the most aggressive vines, growing around a host tree and eventually “squeezing” it to death. Stranglers have their own root system, so after their host trees have died and decomposed, the strangler remains. It is not uncommon in the rainforest to see a mass of twisted and entwined strangler vines fused together to form a single woody trunk that extends up towards the canopy, now itself a host to vines.