Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
A Jaguar on the Beach
T
ROPICAL RAIN FORESTS OFFER
stunning exhibitions of animals and plants. Many artists
have tried to portray this richness, none better than the French painter Henri Rousseau. His
canvases, filled with curious primates and fearsome wild cats, grace the walls of leading mu-
seums, and reproductions appear on the covers of ecology textbooks. Despite Rousseau's lack
of formal scientific training or travel to equatorial regions, his paintings capture many of the
central themes in modern tropical ecology. A biologist wandering through a Rousseau retro-
spective would marvel at how the Parisian anticipated such key topics as the importance of
predation by large cats on large plant-eating mammals, the abundance of plants whose seeds
are animal dispersed, and even a visual hint of the rarity of tropical forest dwellers.
To understand rarity in nature, whether as an artist or a biologist, one of the best places to
look is in the tropical belt. The Amazon and Congo basins, Southeast Asia including Sumatra
(Indonesia), and New Guinea are the four largest expanses of rain forest; along with some
smaller regions, they hold more than 60 percent of the world's known species—crammed into
less than 5 percent of Earth's surface. Because these rain forests are incredibly rich in species,
they contain unusual numbers of rarities. The Foja Mountains of Papua Province, Indonesia,
on the island of New Guinea, serves as a great starter location for understanding how rarity
is created through extreme isolation on mountain chains. The Amazon rain forest, the next
locale on our journey, is a vast, low-lying region where native tree species and a wide vari-
ety of vertebrates that inhabit them—carnivores, monkeys, and macaws, to name a few de-
scribed here—illustrate another crucial type of rarity to consider: species that occur at a very
low density but over a wide range. Three of these great reservoirs are mainland rain forests.
They offer an important missing element in the mix of rarities that is absent in the New Guinea
fauna—top predators, especially the large cats. These cats stalk their prey on the rain forest
floor: jaguars and pumas in the Amazon, leopards in the Congo, tigers and clouded leopards
in parts of Indonesia and Indochina.
