Rainforest information

tropical rainforest

Tropical rainforests are distributed in humid areas on both sides of the equator, including evergreen trees with wet characteristics, vines with thick stems and rainforests with woody and herbaceous epiphytes. These areas are hot and rainy all year round, with the annual average temperature above 26℃, the monthly average temperature above 20℃ and the annual precipitation of 2,500-4,500 mm, which are evenly distributed throughout the year and there is no obvious dry season. There are many kinds of plants, tall trees are dominant, community structure is complex, and there are many layers of trees. Tall trees often have slab roots, in addition, aerial roots, supporting roots and old stems are also common. Evergreen large pinnate compound leaves have many dripping tips. There are a lot of climbing plants in epiphytes, especially woody vines, and there are woody ferns and big-leaved herbs under the forest. There are many kinds of animals, including orangutans, gibbons, tree shrews, rhinoceroses, elephants, tapirs and porcupines. Tropical rainforests are mainly distributed in Amazon basin in South America, Congo basin in Africa and some islands in Southeast Asia, and also distributed in Xishuangbanna, China, southern Taiwan Province Province and southern Hainan Island. The biodiversity is extremely high and the biological resources are very rich. It plays an important role in maintaining the balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

tropical rainforest

"This land is a huge, natural, messy and lush greenhouse created by nature for itself." This is what Charles Darwin said when he first saw the rainforest more than 50 years ago. He talked about it in a derogatory way, which is really unbearable. This is just life dancing wildly. Tropical rainforests have beautiful scenery and almost endless sounds and smells. Exploring the rainforest is like visiting a strange and mysterious planet.

Almost all tropical rainforests are located on both sides of the equator, from the Tropic of Cancer in the north to the Tropic of Cancer in the south. This equatorial belt, like a wide belt, is tied to the abdomen of the earth. In the equatorial zone, the rainforest is very lush, and every forest is Eden. They are the jungle of the world. South America boasts that the Amazon jungle in Brazil and several other neighboring countries is the largest Eden in the world. This area, which is the same size as Australia, is named after the Amazon River, the largest river that flows through this area. The 4000-mile-long Amazon River is wide and swift, and its mouth is the Atlantic Ocean. Sailing on the sea of Wang Yang 100 miles can still scoop a glass of fresh water. One sixth of the fresh water flowing on the earth flows from the vast Amazon River to the ocean.

Other rainforests are distributed in Central America, South Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Central Africa (mainly Zaire). There are also some rainforests in Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in the United States. Figure 1 shows the distribution map of major tropical rainforests in the world.

Although most tropical rainforests are located at the equator, they are very different. Scientists believe that there are more than 40 different kinds of rainforests, all of which have their own flora and fauna. Tropical rain forest can be roughly divided into three types: tropical dry forest, tropical wet forest and real tropical rain forest. This paper mainly talks about the most common tropical rain forest, which is closest to the equator and has the lowest latitude. They are the wettest land in the world, soaked by 400 inches of rain every year, compared with 43 inches in new york and 20 inches in San Francisco. The average temperature in the tropical rain forest is 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature changes little.

Life thrives in this hot and humid environment, and the tropical rain forest has become the most complex and diverse environment on earth. They only account for 7% of the total land area of the earth, but they have 90% species of plants and animals on the earth. Tropical rain forest should be called "the most vital place in the world".

Biodiversity of rainforest

There are as many as 25 different tree species in the thickest forests in the continental United States. There are 2,500 different tree species in the rainforests of Borneo alone. There are 450 trees in Brazil's 2.5-acre Amazon basin. The tallest tree in the rainforest is 200 feet high. These giant trees are suddenly evolved tree species, and their top branches and leaves are luxuriant, standing on the dense leaves in the crown.

The canopy of the rainforest consists of a huge canopy from 100 feet to 120 feet high. About two-thirds of the plants and animals in the rainforest live and inhabit the canopy, which shows the most spectacular scene in nature. There are as many as 20,000 kinds of epiphytes that are parasitic on trees and do not harm them. These epiphytes cover the canopy, just like a spectacular aerial botanical garden. The roots of epiphytes hang freely and absorb water and nutrients from humus accumulated in the air or in the gaps between trunk and branches.

Orchids are by far the most familiar and beautiful epiphytes. Most orchids in the world grow in tropical rain forests. For millions of years, they have changed dramatically with animals. There is an orchid species whose flowers imitate the general body shape of a special female insect and unconsciously contact with haploid male plants to complete pollination.

Bromeliaceae is another epiphyte. Its relatives can get rain from the bottom of the leaves. These stagnant rainwater forms a micro-ecosystem on which small amphibians such as insects and poison dart frogs depend. There are poison dart frogs with bright skin and strong toxicity. Forest hunters use them to make poison arrows and darts that can blow spears. Witch doctors found that this toxin can make people stupid.

There are many wild flying microorganisms in the canopy of the rainforest. Half of the world's birds (about thousands of species) live in the Amazon rainforest. They danced tirelessly among the flowers. Hummingbirds' slender mouths are important pollination tools. Their wings flap 50 to 80 times a second, which is extremely fast; If people want to reach this speed, the energy consumed every day is equivalent to 130 calories of bread.

Colorful parrots, macaws, toucans and birds of paradise decorate the crown like priceless jewels. Their loud cries are common sounds in rainforests. Eagles and falcons dominate the roosts in the canopy, and they will suddenly dive down and kill those animals that are too slow to escape their attacks. They rank first in the forest food chain.

A large number of bats inhabiting the tropical rain forest are also a very special animal. They are the only mammals that can really fly, and there are more than 1000 species of bats in the rainforest. In some areas, about half of mammals are bats. Their biomass is greater than that of all other mammals combined.

Bats vary in size, from small bats that eat insects to "flying foxes" that eat fruit with a wingspan of 6 feet. There are three kinds of vampire bats. They cut their prey with triangular incisors as sharp as razors. There is an anesthetic in the saliva of bats, which can make the prey painless during the whole process, and a coagulant, which can ensure that the nutrients needed by bats will not be lost.

Bats, like insects and birds, are important pollinators of rainforest plants, and they also play a great role in sowing. After eating fruit, bats spread their seeds to all parts of the tropical rain forest during their flight. It is estimated that 95% of the seeds in the tropical rain forest are sown by bats.

Under the canopy, shrubs, vines and small trees compete for space and limited light leaking through dense vegetation. These few plants make up the undergrowth forest, which consists of leafy branches between 50 feet and 80 feet above the rainforest.

Trees under the forest live with creatures such as crowns. It brings together most primates in the world, such as monkeys and apes, swinging around and climbing up and down. Long-haired monkeys, spider monkeys and screaming monkeys are everywhere in the jungles of Central and South America. The common feature of primates in the Western Hemisphere is that they have a tail that can be wrapped around branches and have evolved into a fifth limb that adapts to life in trees. Monkeys in the old world (Asia and Africa) didn't have such tails.

Chimpanzees can be found everywhere in the African rainforest. Chimpanzees, like gorillas, gibbons and orangutans, belong to apes rather than monkeys, so they have no tails. They hunt on the rainforest floor as flexibly as climbing in the canopy. The largest ape gorilla is also a creature of the African rainforest. Because of their huge size, adult gorillas rarely climb trees.

The most common large mammal in the rainforests of Central and South America is the lazy monkey. They are unique in that they can be hung upside down on branches, and their long and curved claws are like meat hooks. Lazy monkeys eat, sleep, mate and even give birth in this posture. Their fur is covered with a lot of seaweed, which provides a light green protective color for lazy monkeys. Different from other mammals, the body temperature of the lazy monkey changes with the change of temperature, so it can be seen that the lazy monkey is hanging upside down in the canopy to bathe in the sun.

The jaguar foraging around the Amazon rainforest is the real beastmaster in the American jungle. Jaguars are the third largest cats after lions and tigers. It dominates the whole forest from the crown to the ground, attacking weak and slow-moving animals. It ranks first in the food chain, and there are no animals that feed on it in nature.

There is no empty niche in the rainforest, and some extremely strange animals have appeared. Arnold Newman described some animals in the tropical rain forest as follows:

The creatures displayed here are like an incredible catalogue. Grass, like bamboo, can grow to 100 feet and 36 inches high every day; The tree body of "Rose" is 145 feet; Daisies and violets are as big as apple trees; Ferns are 60 feet tall, and some of them are the hardest wood; A 37.5-foot-long retractable snake; The floating leaves of water lilies are 5 feet in diameter and can support the weight of a child ... The big flower is the king of flowers in the world, with a diameter of 38 inches and a weight of 38 pounds. The nectaries contain several gallons of liquid; Moths with a wingspan of 12 inches and frogs weighing 100 pounds are big enough to swallow mice and rodents.

It's really strange here. Strange things are often dangerous. American crocodiles lurk everywhere in the stagnant water and many tributaries of the majestic Amazon River. Piranhas can show their sharp teeth and tear up 200-pound animals in a few minutes. The devil who preys on all animals in the water is a terrible parasitic catfish with a sharp thorn. After it smells urine, it enters the urethral orifice of the external genitalia of its prey. They can enter the bladder through the urethra to survive, and can only be removed by surgery. They caused great pain to the patients. Many men in the Amazon tribe usually tie a foreskin bundle at the urethral orifice of their genitals to avoid being invaded by parasitic catfish.

Ordinary ants in the tropical rain forest also grow very big. The biggest ants are African spear ants and South American army ants. Hundreds of thousands of these ants, one inch long or longer, will destroy everything along the way when they pass through the jungle. Horses and cows were eaten alive, and all life was not spared.

Sperm ants, piranhas and poisonous tree snakes also move in the canopy. Strangely, they are not the most poisonous animals in the tropical rain forest. The most poisonous animal is a humble little mosquito. Female ant bites can spread malaria pathogens (this disease is the biggest disease killer in the world). Mosquitoes also spread filariasis that causes elephantiasis. Patients with this etiology have a large number of filariasis in their legs, which is named because they are swollen like legs. Once the patient's external genitalia is infected, put the testicles in the cart before walking.

Destruction of Rainforest —— A worldwide disaster

The figures listed in Lewis Scott's book Rainforest show that the rainforest is being completely destroyed at the rate of 67 acres per minute (equivalent to a football field). Every year, a rainforest the size of New York State disappears forever. Scott warned, "if the rainforest decreases at this rate, most of it will disappear by the end of this century."

The disappearance of the rainforest means that mankind will lose a large number of species forever. Species will be endangered. Many species are now in danger. Orangutans with orange fur (called "forest elders" because their faces are very similar to human faces) used to be everywhere in Asia. Due to the great destruction of habitats, the only gorillas living in trees are becoming less and less, and can only be found in Sumatra and Borneo, Indonesia.

How many animals and plants are extinct or endangered? No one knows, and there is no way to know. There are still 95% creatures on the earth that have not been discovered. What happened to them? Up to now, 6.5438+0.5 million species of organisms have been discovered, half of which are insects. However, there are 6,543,800,000 or even/kloc-0,000,000 species of insects, and most of them live in tropical rain forests.

Newman wrote an interesting observation in the book Tropical Rainforest: We can accurately measure the distance from the earth to the moon (the error is less than 0.25 inch), but we can identify less than 6% of the life on earth. In my opinion, readers don't know what creatures are in the tropical rain forest, so they don't care about their life and death. But we all know that letting the rainforest disappear means that mankind will lose a lot:

A quarter of drugs come from plants and animals in the tropical rain forest. The American National Cancer Institute has discovered 3,000 kinds of plants with anti-cancer function. 70% of them grow in tropical rain forests. Rose-colored Catharanthus roseus can be used to make several medicines for treating childhood leukemia and Hodgkin's disease. Quinine extracted from the bark of tropical cinchona tree is a magical drug for treating malaria. Squibb's medicine is a medicine for treating hypertension, which is made from the venom of Brazilian rattlesnake.

At least 2,500 potential new fruits and vegetables grow in tropical rainforests around the world. Genes obtained from domesticated animals and domesticated plants in the rainforest can be used to improve local livestock. All domestic chickens are descendants of four kinds of jungle birds in Asia. More than 80% of our food, including coffee and cocoa, comes from the rainforest.

Rainforests also provide human beings with tire rubber, chewing gum, paints and cosmetics and olive oil. There is a special tree in the rainforest that can provide hard latex for golf. Diesel oil can be exported directly from the Copeba tree in Brazil. This tree provides 20% of Brazil's diesel oil. Melvin Calvin, the discoverer of this phenomenon, won the Nobel Prize.

Why destroy such precious resources? There are certain reasons. Logging companies cut down a lot of trees and ship hardwood to various countries for sale. By the way, Japan is the largest importer of tropical timber in the world, producing a large number of disposable wooden chopsticks with wood every year and building 65,438+0.10,000 houses.

Cutting down trees and building pastures are also common in rainforest areas. However, this method is extremely inefficient. It is estimated that it takes 67 square feet of Brazilian rainforest to get a 0.25-pound hamburger. People don't think that the soil in the rainforest is actually thin and fragile, and a few heavy rains can wash away all the topsoil. A few years later, ranchers had to give up their old pastures and look for new ones.

In this "slash and burn", many tropical rainforests were cut down and turned into farms. People cut down trees and burn them, and ashes add much-needed nutrients to the soil. However, the fate of the farm is the same as that of the pasture. The topsoil was quickly washed away and the farm had to give up. People destroy a lot of forests and grow coca for illegal drug smuggling. From 65438 to 0988, cocaine ranked first in Colombia's commodity exports, with an export value of $4 billion. Coffee ranked second, with an export value of $654.38+$50 million.

Cutting down and burning rainforests is far more than destroying countless animal and plant species. Destroying the biodiversity on the earth means destroying the atmosphere on which human beings depend. This is a chain reaction.

Green plants and seaweed are special creatures. They inhale carbon dioxide from the air and mix it with water extracted from soil (or ocean) to form monosaccharide, glucose and oxygen. This wonderful change is accomplished by the green pigment in plants (chlorophyll absorbs sunlight to carry out chemical reaction, that is, photosynthesis).

Trees store carbon dioxide absorbed from the air in the form of glucose, which can effectively reduce the content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Trees in tropical rain forests grow rapidly and play an important role in promoting photosynthesis. These trees absorb millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year.

Carbon dioxide is a kind of greenhouse gas, and the pollution of industrial and automobile exhaust also produces a lot of carbon dioxide, so it is extremely necessary to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases absorb heat reflected from the earth's surface to prevent heat leakage. As a result, objects become hot, which is called "global warming".

In the farm established by cutting down forests by slash and burn, "slash and burn" has indeed produced double consequences. First of all, cutting down trees will reduce photosynthesis and eventually increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (which will also reduce the oxygen content necessary for life in the atmosphere). Photosynthesis is very important for oxygen circulation to ensure that there is no shortage of oxygen in the atmosphere. Secondly, setting fire to forests will produce a lot of carbon dioxide, which further worsens the environment. In the end, it can only bring disastrous climate change, melting glaciers and floods. This is no ordinary disaster, it will cause more animal and plant deaths.

In the past 500 million years, the earth has experienced five mass extinctions. The last time was at the end of the Cretaceous period about 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs became extinct. But this is not the worst time. The most serious loss was in the Permian period about 245 million years ago, when the species of marine animals disappeared on a large scale, 77% to 96%, and a large number of creatures on the ground became extinct.

If the rainforest is completely destroyed, by the middle of the next century, it is obvious that mankind is likely to experience the sixth mass extinction. Like previous disasters, life will be severely tested again. But we have lost the Darwinian moth forever. Its tongue is 8 inches long, which can suck juice from special species of orchids, and the grass frog, whose body is almost transparent and its bones are green.

Charies William Bibby, a great naturalist explorer, once said meaningfully, "If the last individual of a certain creature stops breathing, it can only be seen again after the new celestial body or the earth comes back to life."