The Amazon rainforest, located in Brazil and Peru, is the largest and most biodiverse rainforest in the world, with over 2 million square miles of area. It is home to a variety of plant and animal species, but is also dangerous due to predators like electric eels and jaguars. Unfortunately, deforestation is rapidly destroying the rainforest, with about 10% lost since the 1960s and potentially half gone by 2030. Conservation efforts have had limited success.
The largest rainforest in the world, and also the most famous, is the Amazon rainforest, located mainly in Brazil (60%) and Peru (13%) in South America. The Amazon rainforest is the number one biodiversity hotspot on the planet, rivaled only by the Congo rainforest in Africa and the rainforests of Southeast Asia in Asia. The rainforest has an area of more than two million square miles (5.5 million square kilometers), making it the largest rainforest in the world by at least 30% the size of the second largest rainforest, the rainforest of the Congo. More than one in ten known plant and animal species can be found in the Amazon, including about 2.5 million insect species, at least 40,000 plant species, 1,294 birds, 427 mammals, 428 amphibians, and 378 reptiles.
Like other rainforests, the Amazon rainforest is extremely dense, with over 90,000 tons of living plants per square kilometre. The plants cover the sky with a thick canopy, making the ground relatively dark. The huge trees make the world’s largest rainforest a three-dimensional biome, with a canopy layer about 30-40m (100-125ft) above the ground and different animal species living in each layer. Rainforest layers include the canopy, the emergent layer above the canopy, the understory, which lies below the canopy, and the forest floor, which receives only 2% of total sunlight. Frequent rains wash away the soil, meaning rainforest floors are only a few inches thick.
The Amazon rainforest is famous for being beautiful but dangerous. The waters of the Amazon River are inhabited by electric eels, whose shocks can kill; piranhas, which can strip a carcass of meat in minutes; and the Black Caiman, a black crocodile that has been known to kill humans by dragging them underwater until they drown. On land are the Anaconda, one of the world’s largest snakes, at up to 23 feet (7 m) long; poison dart frogs, whose lipophilic alkaloid venoms can kill an animal thousands of times their size, and which include the most venomous animal on Earth; and the famously beautiful jaguar, one of the world’s largest predators, and the largest cat in the Western Hemisphere.
Although the Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world, it is rapidly being deforested. About 10% of the rainforest has been lost to slash-and-burn agriculture since the 1960s, and at the current rate of loss, about half of the rainforest will be destroyed by 2030. Conservationists around the world have adopted a series of measures to discourage the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but they have met with limited success.
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