Twining vine; stems, leaves, and inflorescence branches usually with long whitish trichomes. Leaves peltate; petioles slender, 3-7 cm long; blades ovate to suborbicular, rounded to obtuse or acuminate and mucronate at apex, truncate to cordate at base, 5-11 cm long and wide, glabrous to sparsely long-pubescent above, paler and usually long-pubescent or puberulent below; venation palmate. Staminate inflorescences of fasciculate dichasia in leaf axils or on short axillary branches in the axils of reduced leaves or bracts, the bracts to 1.5 cm long and 2.5 cm wide; flowers minute; sepals 4, 1-1.5 mm long, ca 1 mm wide, usually pubescent on outside; corolla greenish, campanulate, 0.5-1 mm diam, glabrous; stamens with filaments united into a tube; anthers 4, borne on filament tube, glabrous. Pistillate flowers fasciculate in the axils of bracts on secondary branches; sepal 1, ovate to obovate, ca 1 mm long, glabrous or puberulent; petal 1, greenish, suborbicular, ca 0.5 mm long and to 1 mm wide; carpel 1, gibbous, sessile, glabrous; stigma trilobate. Drupes obovoid, flattened, 5-7 mm long, 4-5 mm wide, red, pubescent; seed verrucose, the embryo horseshoe-shaped. Croat 9265. Southern Mexico to northern South America. In Panama, known from tropical moist forest in the Canal Zone, Bocas del Toro, San Blas, Chiriqui, and Darien, from premontane wet forest in the Canal Zone and Chiriqui, and from tropical wet forest in Darien.