Rain washes the canopy clean and drips down through the leaves and down tree trunks gathering up nutrients along the way feeding the lianas and epiphytes as well. All the while every creature utters their song, of mating, of fear, of alarm, of the joy of life, parrots, owls, songbirds, eagles, flightless birds, snakes, lizards, monkeys, rats and rodents, pigs and ungulates, tigers and leopards, even a caterpillar has a song, although our hearing deprives it from us. This is such a huge and complicated system we still do not have a grasp on even the basics of its many aspects. There are an estimated 5-10 million species on this planet, we are not even sure if it is 5 or 10 and we only have names for a few hundred thousand. In the tropical rain forests it is still , even at this advanced time in science, not unusual for new species of birds or mammals to be discovered and new species of plants and insects are discovered on an almost daily basis.
Rainforests are particularly rich systems because of the continuancy of optimal conditions.
If we were preparing for a new dark age and could take only a limited number of books into the monastaries for the duration, we might have to determine which single branch of knowledge would be the greatest survival value. The outstanding candidate would have to be biology, including its applied forms such as medicine, agriculture, forestry and fishing. Yet we are doing just the contrary, by busily throwing out the biology books before they have even been written. In Australia the massive clearing of forests in the late 1800 s and 1900 s has had horrific irriversible effects in many areas. The vast plains of Australia were once an ancient seabed and contain massive amounts of minerals and salts.