More than 60 percent of the world’s plant types exist in tropical rainforests.
These plants provide food for forest-dwelling animals and humans worldwide, and are involved in processes necessary to provide the earth’s ecosystems with oxygen.
Plants compete on rainforest bottoms for sun and nutrients, pushing various plant families off to dwell on branches of other plants, or to strangle tall trees in order to survive.
Orchids
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Orchids comprise the most varied group of flowering plants species, with over 18,000 types in existence.
Ideally designed to thrive in rainforests, orchid roots are vast, enabling them to readily sponge up water and minerals for growth. Orchid epiphyte plants are most often found in moist tropical environments.
In more temperate climates orchids typically develop in soil. In tropical rainforests, orchids generally mature upon trees, though not as parasites. Flowering orchids reproduce into a cornucopia of different shapes and sizes.
Epiphytes
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Asserted by srl.caltech.edu, epiphytes, or “air plants,” as they have been coined, grow abundantly in tropical forests, but typically flourish on various sections of other trees.
Epiphytes manifest copious amounts of seeds compared to ground-dwelling plants, for most epiphyte seedlings fail to discover places to grow, thus dying off.
Other epiphytes like orchids, lichens, mosses and bromeliads compete for real estate to breed on tree branches and trunks. As asserted by Mongabay.com, more than 15,000 epiphytes dwell in the neotropical zone.
As many as 30,000 neotropical epiphytes live in other environments worldwide.
Stranglers
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Tropical stranglers generally originate from the fig class. Matapalo figs initially live as epiphytes, manifested by excretions of fig-eating animals.
Long strangler roots slowly grow toward forest floors, ultimately surrounding their host trees. After a time, the matapalo suffocates its host, leaving behind a vacant internal fissure in the originating host tree.
Ideally, stranglers attach to adult trees to evade rallying for light and minerals on the forest bottom.
Spineless Indian Bamboo
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Spineless Indian bamboo, or bengal bamboo is a plant of the genus “Bamdusa,” and of the class “tulda.”
According to blueplanetbiomes.org, Indian bamboo thrives in rainforests of Southeast Asia.
Bambusa tulda flourish in lush environments, making rainforests ideal bamboo habitats. Tropical rainforests commonly receive 100 inches or more of annual rainfall. Spineless Indian bamboo can grow up to between 40 and 80 feet in height.
Bamboo is not a tree, but rather a grass, which prospers perennially. Spineless Indian Bamboos only flower once during their lifetime, typically a span of 25 to 40 years.
Bromeliads
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Bromeliads are relatives of the pineapple family. These waxy-leaved tropical rainforest plants resourcefully capture, and hold several gallons of water in their central cavities.
These cavities are bowl-shaped, and eventually become breeding grounds for small animals like frogs, salamanders and beetles. When these animals die, their decomposition material provides nourishment for the bromeliad.
