The Panama Rainforest is a birdwatchers paradise with hundreds of species of birds. An ecosystem with a large biodiversity of both animal and plant life.
And it’s a question that’s been vexing scientists for decades. Why are there so many different living things in the rainforest?
Leaf-eating crabs harvest a staggering 80% of the leaf litter in the Mangrove forests in Bangladesh. The crabs’ tunnel network helps oxygenate the mangrove.
In any ecosystem, top predators exert what we call “an ecology of fear”. And this influences the behaviour and movement of their prey. Here, that may be monkeys, or deer, or humans. In the Sunderbans the Tigers keep large numbers of people out of the forest, and they also keep all the herbivores on the move, so they don’t damage the trees.
Chris Packam explores the intricate web of relationships between plants and animals that populate the temperate forests of the world.
Here, I can stand at the foot of 1000-year-old cedars and 90-metre-tall Sitka spruce trees. The combination of large mountains and ocean winds generates unusually heavy rainfall – earning this place the title The Raincoast.
The Canadian Lynx is prevalent in the icy-cold northern forests, where they prey on the elusive, well-camouflaged Snowshoe Hare.
It’s taken some finding but it’s there – the snowshoe hare! You can just make out its beady little black eye, and the black tips to its ears. And these things form 80% of the lynx’s diet. But, as you can see, they don’t make it easy for that lynx.
The trees of the rainforest rely on animals to disperse their seed to ensure germination away from the parent tree and it’s associated pests.
Rainforests, more than any other ecosystem, rely on animals to spread their seeds over large distances. But paradoxically, this has created a nightmare.
The White Rhinoceros digests huge quantities of low-grade sour grass. This give her the essential nitrogen AND releases it, through her dung, to the land.
Right across the world, it’s sweet grass that’s crucial for most grassland grazers… And it’s this quest for sweet grass that drives one of the largest movements of animals on our planet. every year, one and a half million wildebeest migrate 3,000 kilometre, all because of essential nitrogen.
The rainforests of the world form an Emerald band aroung the entire globe.
But here in the rainforest, there is no winter and as a consequence, the plants here are under almost relentless attack. Our ant is just one worker among thousands in a single colony. Each ant deposits our leaf fragment deep within the nest.
The plankton bloom is an explosion of life, powered by an upswelling of nutrients and bright sunlight. It feeds such giants as the Whale Shark.
And plankton blooms attracts some of the most awe-inspiring creatures. Here, in the Indian Ocean, I’ve come to witness one of the most enchanting…
The Sponges that live alongside the Coral Polyps capture and concentrate the nutrients from the waste matter of other creatures in the ecosystem of the coral reef.
A sponge like this one can pump five times its own volume of water through its feeding canal in just one minute! And a sponge, just 60 cm in length, can filter the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just five days!
A relationship between the Maned Wolf, the leaf-cutter ant and the Lobeira Fruit reveals how life survives in the nitrogen-starved El Cerrado.
These connections are not just important for the creatures concerned. Because of the way they move precious nitrogen around, they are crucial to the entire grassland ecosystems.
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