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Taman Negara in Malaysia is the world’s oldest rainforest. It has flourished since the land rose from the sea during the Jurassic era, around 130 million years ago. Even ice ages haven’t affected the forest.
Far outnumbering the human inhabitants are the flora and fauna of Taman Negara. Within the park boundaries there are tigers, Malayan tapirs, elephants, wild boar, various species of deer, leopards, sun bears, civets and wild ox, to name just a few.
Add to this between 200-300 species of birds and thousands of insects making their lives on the jungle floor. Taman Negara has one of the richest ecologies on earth, protected both by its impenetrability and Malaysian law.
Read more about Taman Negara at Environmental Graffiti. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user taylorandayumi)
There is an entire ecosystem in a previously-overlooked layer of a rainforest. Between the treetops and the forest floor, falling leaves are caught in a matrix of almost-inivisible filaments of the fungus Marasmius. Jake Snaddon from the University of Oxford has been studying this in-between layer of leaves and fungus.
When Snaddon shifted his focus to these hanging leaves, he soon realised their importance. In every hectare (the size of a rugby pitch, or London’s Trafalgar Square), the fungi hold around 260 kilograms of leaves. They hold 2-3 times more than other epiphytes can, and they’re more evenly dispersed.
These litter-traps are suspended worlds. Snaddon counted around 340 different species of insects and other arthropods among the dead leaves. If he removed the fungi, the number of species in the lower canopy fell by 57 percent, and the total number of individuals fell by 70 percent. That’s a huge figure, especially when you consider that around 60 percent of the canopy’s arthropods live in its lowest parts. Clearly, our knowledge of the rainforest was missing a crucial layer.
Next Snaddon will look at the relationships between the different species of life in the rainforest mezzanine. Link
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Ecologically speaking, devastation of the Amazon rainforest is far greater than the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. So why do we care more about the Gulf?
Dan Aierly of Need to Know on PBS explains:
Here’s what we know about human caring and compassion. First and foremost, it is based on our emotions rather than our reasoning. Joseph Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Mother Teresa said, “If I look at the masses I will never act, but if I look at the one I will.” In oil spill terms: We see pelicans and turtles mired and dying in oil, and we want to cry. We hear about families who have had their homes ruined and their livelihoods horribly affected or even destroyed, and we sympathize with their helplessness and want to do something to help them recover. Our compassion isn’t necessarily proportional to the magnitude of the catastrophe. It depends on how much of our emotion is invoked. [...]
Here are a few characteristics that might differentiate the BP oil spill from the destruction of the Amazon. First, it is a singular event with a precise beginning. Second, while the tragedy was ongoing (and we are not yet sure if it has ended or not) it seemed to become more desperate by the day. Third, we have a single organization that we can villainize. In contrast, in the Amazon, there are many organizations and individuals at fault, both in the countries where deforestation is occurring and abroad. And fourth, the Gulf is so much closer to home (at least for Americans).
NASA’s Earth Observatory has some amazing satellite photos of the deforestation of the Amazonian rainforest over the past 8 years. At the link, click on the years posted below the picture to see the progression.
The state of Rondônia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s original 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres, an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas) has been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by 1988; and 53,300 by 1998. By 2003, an estimated 67,764 square kilometers of rainforest—an area larger than the state of West Virginia—had been cleared.
From the Upcoming 
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Here’s something for you to ponder the next time you’re in the bathroom: American’s love for soft toilet paper is ecologically hard on forests!
… fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.
Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.” [...]
Though most of the pulp comes from tree farms, but not all:
Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.
To bring attention to the destruction of rainforests worldwide, German environment conservation group OroVerde and ad agency Ogilvy came up with this tongue-in-cheek poster depicting the various of logging machinery "species" in the rainforest: Link
