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. But even at the risk of loss of limb, trees can benefit from providing a home to epiphytes.
Organic matter accumulates around the roots of the hitchhiking plants, creating a mass of rich soil.
Trees send out roots from their branches that reach through this fertile earth and collect nutrients. The epiphytes include orchids, bromeliads, cacti, ferns, mosses, lichens, and liverworts, totaling some 30,000 species. One tree may hold hundreds of species of orchids and more than a thousand species of epiphytes. Biologists can pick out the paths of canopy wildlife along certain tree branches that are stripped clean of epiphytes, signaling heavy traffic along a principal aerial highway. The complex structure of the rainforest canopy allows a huge range of plant species to exist, while providing different microhabitats to wildlife, both vertebrates and invertebrates.