From an airplane, the rain forest canopy looks like vast fields of bulging broccoli. From the forest floor, it looks like a twisted maze of branches, vines and streamers. Both views are misleading. To the millions of plants and animals that live out their entire lives in the roof of the rain forest, the canopy is a sunny paradise with room to scamper across well-traveled branch paths, or even to fly, glide or leap.
The canopy is the powerhouse of the rain forest, where more than 90% of photosynthesis takes place and, in the fullest sense, life begins. Wind and pounding rain cause dead leaves and branches to fall down constantly from the canopy. On the floor, they decompose, and are sucked up as nutrients by tree roots, and then returned to the canopy to continue the cycle of life. The brightly lit, noisy world of the rainforest canopy, some 100 feet or more above the floor, is in a lot of ways an undiscovered continent.
Though it teems with life - ants, plants, monkeys and macaws, the canopy was off limits to people until recently. It still remains largely unexplored, but a new generation of scientists is trying a variety of wildly imaginative tactics to get up close and personal with life in the treetops. Fifty percent (maybe more) of all rain forest species live in the canopy. Determined women and men have constructed platforms, nailed ladders to trees, built walkways suspended across crowns, and used mountain-climbing equipment - all in an effort to unlock the ecological secrets of the canopy. They’ve found a poisonous caterpillar, and giant weevils that carry miniature gardens of mosses and lichens on their backs. Amid hundreds of individual plant and animal discoveries, the most important discovery is that life on our glorious plane is even more diverse and more plentiful than anyone imagined!
As photosynthesis is the dominant natural process is the canopy, the forest floor is a dark house of decomposition. Here, the work of nature is carried out by termites, ants, fungi, bacteria and millipedes - the "cleaning crew" of the forest. These organisms break down dead plants and animals into nutrients-and they work fast! Decomposition is so quick in the tropics, that the forest floor is pretty empty. Can you see how these two layers of life-the canopy and the forest floor are connected?
-Alexander Skutch
Bromeliad Microhabitats
Swingin’ In the Rain
The canopy is the powerhouse
of the rain forest where 90% of photosynthesis
takes place.
Scientists have only recently begun to study the canopy.
In many ways it is still an unexplored
continent.
Fifty percent of rainforest
animals live in the canopy.
Through discovery of thousands
of new species in the canopy,
scientists have learned that life on Earth is even more
diverse than previously imagined.
In contrast to the canopy, the forest
floor is a dark place where decomposition
is the dominant process.
The canopy and floor are connected
through the nutrient cycle.
