Seedlings struggle to gather enough light and strain their growing tips toward the canopy. Masses of fungal strands grow through and dissolve rotting logs occasionally blooming with the most beautifully coloured soft bodied fruit bodies. Their spores spread into the air and onto plants and soil around. Velvet worms burrow into the rotting logs and hunt for insects. Ants gather up leaves and soil to bury in their subterranean fungal farms.
Beetles gather up the dung from canopy creatures and roll it away to their dung processing burrows.
Lizards and rodents harvest the beetles and ants for dinner as well as a variety of vines and seedlings and small fruits. Vines crawl up the side of massive buttressed trees and reptiles cling to the trunks soaking up the light and heat while lying in wait for dinner to come by. Spiders live in the bark and the leaf litter hunting and laying traps for other microorganisms. Fungal strands in the soil wait for passing bacteria and catch them in their coils and high in the canopy a snake does the same with a monkey. Birds of all kinds sound the alarm of the nearby predator and reptiles and mammals alike scuttle back to their canopy homes.