![]() ![]() Sometimes they need to travel 200 feet, equal to an average human walking about 6 miles with 5,000 lbs. They then carry these fragments, weighing as much as 50 times their body weight, back to their homes. They climb trees up to 100-feet tall and cut out small pieces of leaves. Have you ever heard of an ant that farms? Or ants that act as security guards? Leaf-cutter, or parasol ants, can rightfully be called the world’s first farmers. Insects are often beautiful and always fascinating. One scientist found 50 different species of ants on a single tree in Peru! You would probably only need a few hours of poking around in a rainforest to find an insect unknown to science. ![]() Scientists estimate that there are more than 50 million different species of invertebrates living in rainforests. The only living animals you could be sure to see are the millions of insects creeping and crawling around in every layer of the rainforest. It’s so small, it could sit in a person’s hand! Q: Which type of rainforest species is most numerous?Ī: If you were to visit a rainforest, you probably wouldn’t run into many jaguars or monkeys. Its entire population lives within a few square miles in the Amazon rainforest. The Maues marmoset, a species of monkey, wasn’t discovered until recently. Living in limited areas, most of these species are endemic, or found nowhere else on earth. Other species consist of only a few dozen individuals. Some rainforest species have populations that number in the millions. They rarely have to search for water, as rain falls almost every day in tropical rainforests. year-round, animals don’t have to worry about freezing during cold winters or finding shade in the hot summers. With temperatures constant at 75 -80 degrees F. The nearly perfect conditions for life also helped contribute to the great number of species. Therefore, rainforest plants and animals continued to evolve, developing into the most diverse and complex ecosystems on earth. But the giant freeze did not reach a number of refuges in tropical rainforests. During the Ice Ages, the last of which ended about 10,000 years ago, the frozen areas of the North and South Poles spread over much of the earth, causing a high rate of animal extinction. Some rainforests in Southeast Asia have been around for at least 100 million years, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Explore RAN's Wildlife Factsheets Q: Why do more animal species live in the rainforest than other parts of the world?Ī: Scientists believe that there is a great diversity of animals because rainforests are the oldest ecosystems on earth. ![]()
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