Animals
When you think of the rain forest, what do you think of? Some people think of the animals. In the rain forest there are a lot of animals. Actually there are more types of animals here than in any other place in the world. The animals play an important part of the life cycle. They actually help produce some plants. You may think this is impossible, but it can happen. The plants can grow from half eaten food, dropped food, rotten food, and even droppings. As you see, the animals are an important part of the rain forest. They help keep their home alive.
There
are many places for animals to live. Most of them have
adapted
to living in the trees. This means that most of the
population
of the animals live in the trees. The bigger animals live on
the forest floor of the rain forest. The large cats live on
the forest floor but sometimes get their food from above in
the trees. Some of the smaller or medium sized animals live
in the trees like the sloth or the marmoset monkey, who can
also walk on the ground. Sometimes the animals that you
usually see in the water are found in the 
trees.
For example, the tree frog.
There are very many amazing animals in the rain forest. I will tell you about some of them. The leaf cutter ants go up a tree, cut a leaf, bring down part of this leaf on their backs a leaf five times their own body weight! (That is like a person walking six miles with five thousand pounds on their back) They then bury the leaf underground.
They wait for it to grow fungi to eat. Deja vu! That's exactly what we do in farming. Another type of amazing ant is the Aztec ants. They live on a Swollen Thorn Acacia tree. These ants guard the tree! No way! Yes, they kill anything that moves under the tree or any plants that try to grow on the tree. This helps keep the tree and ants alive. The toucan and the parrot are the animal nutcrackers. They adapted to the rain forest by growing hard and strong beaks to crack and open nuts to eat.
In the rain forest there are not many large animals. This is because the vegetation is so plentiful. There are many different types of animals in the rain forest. There are the terrestrial animals. These animals live on micro-organisms, plants, litter, and fallen fruits. Terrestrial animals are land animals. They have not adapted to the trees. Micro-organisms are the little microscopic animals and plants that live in the rain forest. Another type are the herbivores. They are plant eaters. These animals are usually the larger ones like the sloth. The next group of animals are the carnivores. They eat the herbivores. There are very few carnivores. Jaguars are an example of this.The invertebrates are any animals who do not have backbones, such as insects, spiders, worms to name just a few. There are a lot of invertebrates in the rain forest . The arboreal animals live in the trees. There are quite a lot of animals in the rain forest. This group is split into many sub-groups.
The
rain forest houses many insects. There are at least 30,000
different types of insects in the rain forest. This means
that the other animals are depended upon to keep the insect
population down. The animals can do this in many ways. The
monkeys do this by eating the insects after
picking them off each other. Some of the birds peck at the
bark and then eat the bugs that they find. Some animals have
adapted to coming out after dark. This is when there are
more bugs out. This is a smart thing to do. Though these
insects annoy the animals, they will always be
there.
These animals are a reality to us, but in the future of Earth they might be a thing of the past since we are destroying their home. We need your help.