Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 73
Thunderheads cast giant shadows across the upper Amazon at sunset. Even
3,000 kilometers from its mouth, this mighty river can easily accommodate ocean-going
freighters.
Like Alfred Russel Wallace, more than a century earlier, I was astonished
by the sheer diversity of Manù's rainforest. Wallace had remarked on the
sheer numbers of dif erent tree species crammed into the Brazilian rainfor-
est, so many that one almost never fi nds two members of the same species
Exhaustive censuses have now shown that rainforests in Borneo, Peru, and
Venezuela can have almost a thousand dif erent tree species in a single hect-
are—that is, in a patch of ground that measures a hundred meters by a hun-
dred meters. The trees carry on their branches, trunks, and roots a dizzyingly
diverse freight of epiphytic plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and
mammals, along with a little-explored zoo of mostly invisible creatures like
bacteria and fungi.
