Travel Trivia: ‘What is the world's largest rainforest?’

December 28, 2019, somewhere near the Amazon rainforest — I subscribe to a site called Travel Trivia. Of course I do! It’s one of many — too many — but it does ask interesting questions (sometimes) and the answers are interesting (sometimes). About a week before I embarked, it asked me, 'What’s the world’s largest rainforest?’ I got it right! (I take their quizzes every day and I am often wrong.) Here’s what they had to say about the Amazon rainforest:

Covering 2.1 million square miles, the Amazon rainforest is far and away the world’s largest. The rainforest’s biodiversity is also unparalleled. Home to a tenth of the world’s mammal species and a fifth of its plants and birds, the stunning Amazon, named for the river that runs through it, forms 60% of Brazil, 13% of Peru, 10% of Colombia, and a comparably smaller portion of Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Venezuela, French Guiana, and Suriname. Believe it or not, the world’s second largest rainforest is in Africa, but at only about half the size of the Amazon (1.4 million square miles), the Congo rainforest simply can’t compete.

I am currently chugging — slowly — up the Amazon, with dense greenery on either side of the café au lait river. But I am not in the rainforest, or so I was told at a lecture. There’s too much jungly growth and sunlight at the edge of the wood for this to be a true rainforest.

A ‘rainforest’ is a continuous canopy with a few really tall trees piercing the canopy, and the slightly shorter ones touching one another, so hardly any light can get through. Shrubs grow on the forest floor. You can walk through a rainforest — no machete required.

Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula rainforest has 10 species of trees. The Amazon rainforest has 400 — and as many or more species of animals. There are 30,000 — thirty thousand! — species of orchids. Its soil is shallow and low in nutrients.

Local residents include the toucan, pink dolphin, capybara, giant armadillo, jaguar, tapir, marmosets, howler monkeys and two- and three-toed sloths. Sloths hang around at the very tops of the trees — where they are prey to eagles with very large feet. I guess I mean very large talons.

The dominant insect is the ant. I’m glad it’s not the mosquito, though I have come prepared. #