Book 17, Question 71
How Can One Rainforest Tree Hold Thousands of Insects?
One rainforest tree can be a whole city for insects! Scientists counted thousands of insects living in the branches of a single treetop. A tree has many different places to live, and each place has its own residents.
More fun facts
- Scientist Terry Erwin studied treetop insects by releasing a fog of biodegradable insecticide into the canopy.
- In Panama, the fog brought down a rain of thousands of kinds of arthropods that no one had named yet.
- He kept them in alcohol so they could be sorted later in the lab.
- From this work, he estimated there might be 30 million kinds of arthropods in the world.
- Earlier estimates said about one million, so his number was about ten times bigger.
- Erwin collected more than five million specimens from rainforest treetops.
- From one single tree in Peru, scientist E. O. Wilson found 43 kinds of ants, about as many as in the whole British Isles.
Sources: National Institutes of Health, nationalacademies.org
Questions kids ask
How did people react to the 30 million idea?
It caught on. One conservation group even made a bumper sticker saying 30 million insects can't all be wrong.