Early explorers used ropes and pulleys or ladders carved into tree trunks. Today, biologists explore the canopy via towers, suspension bridges, rafts lowered gently onto treetops by dirigibles, and even construction cranes. Biologists now know that about 90 percent of all organisms in a rainforest are found in the canopy. The sun that barely reaches the forest floor strikes treetops with full force, fueling the photosynthesis that results in leaves, fruit, and seeds. Since there's so much good food way up there, animals abound in the canopy.
Insects are everywhere in the rainforest, and particularly in the canopy.
Canopy dwellers also include many animal species you might assume stick to the ground floor such as cockroaches, mice, earthworms, and scorpions. These animals don't actually fly, but rather control their falls, by spreading their limbs and flattening their bellies, maximizing their undersurfaces to slow their descents. The blooms in a rainforest canopy's garden are flowers of the trees themselves and of the plants that climb up tree trunks. But the most numerous and most spectacular canopy flowers are epiphytes, which take nutrients and moisture from the air, rather than from the soil via a root system. Epiphytes festoon tree branches, sometimes in such large numbers that the entire branch gives way from the weight.