The largest area of tropical rain forest on earth is Amazonia. According to Greenpeace, it covers 7.8 million square kilometers which is 5% of the Earth’s surface, contains 20% of the Earth’s fresh water and 15% of all plants that grow on land. This vast eco-system is rapidly disappearing as illegal lumber operations openly remove great swathes of the forest each year, and the native population around the edges of the forest fell trees to grow cash crops like soya and sugar cane.
Most of the animals that live in the tropical rain forest spend the majority of their time up high in the tree tops. Monkeys use their tails to assist in climbing and other creatures, both mammals and reptiles, have evolved to fit in with their environment. Some have flaps of skin under their limbs which act just like wings, and broad webs between their toes to enable them to ‘fly’ between the tree tops. This is a fabulous, almost fantasy-story type of world, inhabited by ‘flying’ frogs, lizards, snakes and even squirrels. It is a vast unexplored area of our world.
Forest birds, like parrots of many different kinds, touracos and hornbills, spend most of their time walking along branches instead of flying. Many plants grow high up in the tops of trees and are scarce on the forest floor because of the lack of light.
There is so much variety in animal and plant life in the world’s rain forests that it has never been possible to identify and catalogue them all.
The heat and humidity is constant in this environment, and the rain forests act like giant natural greenhouses. In the Amazon rainforest alone, 40% of the world’s fresh-water fish live and breed; there are more than 4300 identified species of bird including 319 varieties of hummingbird. Experts cannot begin to count the vast number of insect species in this environment. Estimates vary but the consensus is that there are more than a million different types. The scale and variety of this is unimaginable but its importance to the Earth is crystal clear.
The most talked-about and best-known Amazonian fish are the piranhas. These meat eaters have a voracious appetite and very powerful, razor-like jaws. They grow to a maximum of twelve inches long and hunt their prey in packs of up to a hundred. It is on record that a shoal of piranhas turned a one hundred pound capybara (large web-footed rodent) into a skeleton in less than sixty seconds.
There have been numerous attempts to establish managed forestry plantations within rain forest areas, but most have failed because insect damage and disease has killed the plants. One example of this was the 1928 attempt of the Ford motor Company to grow rubber at Fordlandia in the Amazon. The whole project was wiped out by a kind of leaf blight which is a fungal infection of wild trees. Other plantations in different parts of the world have been destroyed by insects that eat the wood and destroy its commercial value before it can be felled.
In the wild forests, the trees grow at a distance from others of their own kind. This is anything up to four hundred meters apart and is the reason why any given area of the rain forest will be crowded with lots of different species, instead of groups of the same one. Most trees are far enough from neighboring trees of their own species, to be out of range of pests and carriers of disease which may move between them.
Amazonian Indians first discovered and used rubber. When Christopher Columbus ventured into this area, he recorded in his log that the Indians made balls from black vegetable gum. The Indians called the tree and its gum, cahuchu which literally means ‘the tree that weeps’. The word ‘rubber’ was coined by English scientist Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) when he observed that the material would rub out pencil marks.
After US inventor, Charles Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize–or harden–rubber in 1839, it became vital for wheeled transport all over the world. At first, the wealth generated from this flowed into the Amazon and rubber merchants became very wealthy, but a somewhat underhand trick broke the Brazilian monopoly on the rubber trees.
An English botanist, called Sir Henry Wickham, chartered a ship so that he could take 70,000 rubber tree seeds back to England. He was given permission to do this because he claimed that the seeds were specimens to be given to the royal plant collection at Kew Gardens in London. What actually happened was that once the seeds had been grown into seedlings in the greenhouses at Kew, they were shipped to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and Malaya where large rubber plantations were started.
The wild rubber from the Amazon trees could not compete pricewise with the specially cultivated type from the new plantations and the Brazilian market quickly disappeared. This is the real reason why it was, in the eyes of commercially-minded individuals, no longer necessary to protect the Amazon rain forest. For many years it has been hacked at, chopped down, logged and cleared for farming–and only now science realizes how vital this huge eco system is to the world; but still the damage continues.
Who knows what plants and other life may lie undiscovered in the hidden depths of this wilderness. Aspirin, which is known and used all over the world, came from a tree bark. Cynarin which came from the artichoke, is used in Germany to combat liver disease and stress. Many plant based-drugs have been used in cancer treatment, including camtothecin and lapacol. The list is huge and the potential loss of other undiscovered plants within the Amazon rain forest, that may turn out to be useful to mankind, should be a major concern. Add to this the issues of environmental damage, climate change and unstable weather patterns, and the loss of such a vast area of rain forest has the potential to be a global disaster. Steps are being taken to prevent further damage; let’s hope that things move quickly.
