Temperate or Tropical rain forest, Which Has More Species of Organism

Temperate or Tropical rain forest, where do you think we have more species of living creatures the most. If you live in the temperate forest region, you would think that we will find more insects, birds, tress and other animals of different diversity there but in reality, this is false because you will find more tree species and animal species in half a square meter of the Amazon rain forest than in 4 million kilometer of temperate forest. One question we should ask ourselves is WHY?

When we look at the map of the world in a flat square shape, we will assume that the tropical rain forest isn't as large as other parts of the world but scientist have continue to say that using flat maps isn't correct, so if we look at it from the globe world map, we will see that about 40% of the world map falls under the tropical region.

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We cannot deny that climate as a factor and it even shows when looking through the fossils of plant as they have more history in the tropics than in the temperate. We could say that species in the tropics survived the ice-age extinction, so they were alive, also since there are no snows, the weather seems to be favorable to animals and plant species.

Although there is no snow, this doesn't mean that it is all rosy in the tropics. Currently, we are about to get into the dry season and during this season, all species including humans need to compete for resources. While that of human seen minimal since we have been able to design a world around ourselves, animals and plants need to compete tediously to get the resources they need.

animalia

Forget the dry season because it doesn't last for long my dear. The tropics is always warm as it has more solar radiation throughout the year than any other part of the world, also there is enough water condensing and falling to ground since there is sufficient sunlight, and with this, plants and the animals they support get enough energy and so they are able to live well leading to increase productivity. With this we can have an increase in a particular specie of organism but this doesn't explain the increased number of specie in the region.

Talking about niches, organisms that live in regions of higher latitude have to deal with adaptation as they need to adapt to different weather conditions since they have to scale through about 4 different climatic condition. Today, there can be surplus of food while the next day, it is snowy and so these organisms need to learn to adapt but in the tropics, live seem to be more stable.

Wikimedia

For instance, there are times when I call my uncle in Canada, and he will tell me that the sun sets late but back home the sun usually set between 6PM and 7PM all the time no matter the month of the year. With this somewhat stable day and night shift, animals tend to have equal time for their shift to hunt, eat, and live their lives compared to in the temperate and other regions with higher latitude as they have to learn to adapt to varying day and night time.

The good weather in the tropics allow for different species of organisms to reproduce faster and have more generations known as shorter generation times and this leads to competitions allowing for specialization in this organism. You will see that scientists usually go to the tropics to understand more about the life of organisms and to learn more about how much life exists in our world because the tropics is a great place for biodiversity.

^Reference

^{https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jbi.12228
https://www.wsl.ch/en/news/why-the-tropics-are-so-rich-in-species/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259552528
https://www.livescience.com/why-so-many-species-in-tropics
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-there-are-so-many-species-equator-and-so-few-poles
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534711002680}