The Wood Wide Web is a phrase coined to describe the extraordinary network of fungal threads that interconnects all the trees and plants in the forest.
It’s fantastic to think that what animals do in one season influences the forest ecosystem throughout the year. It’s almost as if all of these stories are choreographed.
Just as the rainforest plants are constantly evolving, so too are the pests that feed on them and indeed do the weird animals who, in turn, feed here.
Heliconius Doris is a brightly-coloured butterfly advertising the fact that, as a caterpillar, it fed on the cyanide rich leaves of the passion flower vine.
The trees of the Borneo rainforests rely on the specialist pollinator to propagate their flowers like the dazzling Sunbird.
The story of why the Brazil nut needs the orchid is extraordinary. It’s so wonderful, it’s almost beyond belief. And through unravelling that story, we can understand some astonishing things.
Termites exist in such vast numbers in the Cerrado that, collectively, they weigh more than all the other mammals. The termite mound is a nitrogen producer.
So using the nitrogen they get from that bacteria, the nutrients they get from the fungus, they are able to turn this dead woody material into a productive food source.
Kenya’s Reticulated Giraffe lives on the unpalatble thorny acacia tree because it is rich in nitrogen. The Crematgaster Ants nest in the hollow thorns.
Who would have thought that a bettong would need a bandicoot, that the leaf-cutter ant would need a maned wolf, or, indeed, that the gecko would need a giraffe?
The thick oxygen-starved mud of the Sunderbans supports a startling variety of incredible life-forms. These swamps of Bangladesh are the home of the tiger.
Well, the secret of the Sunderbans, lies in beautiful relationships that have evolved between the most unlikely species – including the Bengal tiger. And it all starts with a very peculiar plant… The mangrove.
Nitrogen is a tasteless, colourless gas. Yet it is an important building block to all life in the Savannah. Life like the dwarf gecko and maned wolf.
I can tell you that almost everything that happens out here in this grassland ecosystem is governed by a craving for this rare resource. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that grasslands can only function because they can cope so ingenuously with so little of it.
Fish feed the forest. During the salmon run, there is such a surfeit of fish that grizzly bears only eat rhe choice pieces, leaving the rest to rot in the forest
The nutrients from the rotting salmon are essential to the fungi and trees in the forest.
Non-native species have had a dramatic, detrimental effect on large parts of the Australian Grassland. The Rothwell Research Centre is preserving it.
Restricting alien species is allowing the indigent animals a chance to recover and re-establish their place in the grassland ecosystem.
Despite the Salmon Run lasting only a few weeks, the grizzly bear get 80% of its annual protein from this fish. How is that possible?
The rotting salmon carcasses discarded last year by the pi9cky grizzly bears fertilise the ground and plants for the hungry bears in the spring.
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