The Hidden Complexity of the Rain Forest

When I imagined what walking through a rain forest in Costa Rica would be like, I pictured a lush green area that was teeming with plants, birds and animals. So when I hiked through the Monteverde Cloud Forest, all of the plants and orchids I saw were pretty much just as I pictured them.

But I was surprised at how difficult it was to see birds or animals. We wouldn’t have seen any wildlife if it wasn’t for our guide. Besides knowing the English and Spanish name for every plant, bird, and mammal, we encountered, he knew enough about each organism’s tendencies to see them in areas where they would otherwise be fully camouflaged.

Quetzal. That’s how he spotted a female Quetzal, which are considered to be one of the world’s most beautiful birds. Instead of looking in the dense, green forest for the colorful bird, he looked in the tepeguacate trees for the small avocados or aguacatillos they eat. Soon after he pointed out the aguacatillos, he had located a Quetzal and pointed out which branches it was sitting on under the green canopy.

In her book River of Doubt, Candice Millard describes Theodore Roosevelt’s epic journey through the Amazon rain forest soon after losing the 1912 presidential election. One of the things that nearly killed him and his crew was how much trouble they had finding food. Among their greatest frustrations was being unable to find game animals or catch the fish they would see swimming in the river. The men also assumed they could eat Brazil nuts on their journey, but never managed to find any.

Complexity and Sophistication. The inability to find food in a rain forest that is full of wildlife, is the “product of millions of years of evolutionary pressure, which had refined the reproductive methods of the jungle’s plants and trees to an extraordinary level of complexity and sophistication,” Millard writes.

An example of this is the royal water lilly, Millard says. To reproduce, its flowers must bloom, turn white and emit a strong odor, and increase their temperature to attract the scarab beetles that pollinate them. When a beetle arrives, the flower closes around it and covers it with pollen. About one day later, the flower turns red, cools off, and releases the beetle, which then carries the pollen to other lily flowers.

The key to finding food in the rain forest is to identify the right combinations. The same fish that Roosevelt and his men couldn’t catch were easy prey for the Amazon’s Cinta Larga Indians, who used a milky liquid extracted from a vine to paralyze them and scoop them up in a basket, Millard tells us.