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The Amazon rainforest is a species-rich biome in which thousands of species live, including animals found nowhere else in the world. To date, there is at least 40,000 different kinds of plants, 427 kinds of mammals, 1,300 kinds of birds, 378 kinds of reptiles, more than 400 kinds of amphibians, and around 3,000 freshwater fish are living in Amazon.
And unlike the Amazon where everything is larger than life, these forests offer sanctuary to a group of smaller animals. The Kodkod is the smallest cat in the Americas , weighing only about 5 lbs.
Fungi are also very common in rainforest areas as they can feed on the decomposing remains of plants and animals. The great diversity in rainforest species is in large part the result of diverse and numerous physical refuges , [ 25 ] i.e. places in which plants are inaccessible to many herbivores, or in which animals can hide from predators.
Lovejoy and other WWF biologists, and Brian Boom, the director of the NY Botanical Garden, facilitated her travel to Manaus, Brazil, to experience the rainforest firsthand. She explored the vast forest around Lovejoy's research site, part of his famous "forest fragments" project, and sketched and photographed the plants and animals there. [2]
Image credits: an1malpulse #5. Animal campaigners are calling for a ban on the public sale of fireworks after a baby red panda was thought to have died from stress related to the noise.
Rainforests are home to half of all the living animal and plant species on the planet. [7] Two-thirds of all flowering plants can be found in rainforests. [5] A single hectare of rainforest may contain 42,000 different species of insect, up to 807 trees of 313 species and 1,500 species of higher plants. [5]
The largest surviving species is the great slaty woodpecker, which weighs 430 g (15 oz) on average and up to 563 g (19.9 oz), and measures 45 to 55 cm (18 to 22 in), but the extinct imperial woodpecker, at 55 to 61 cm (22 to 24 in), and ivory-billed woodpecker, around 48 to 53 cm (19 to 21 in) and 516 g (18.2 oz), were probably both larger.
The Amazon rainforest, [a] also called Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km 2 (2,700,000 sq mi), [ 2 ] of which 6,000,000 km 2 (2,300,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest . [ 3 ]