answers-lfrf
Rainforest Destruction
From:
Subject: RAINFOREST DESTRUCTION
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 22:23:16 +0100
Back to top
QUESTION:
DEAR SIR
AT THE RATE WE ARE DESTROYING THE RAINFORESTS, HOW LONG
BEFORE IT WILL BE TO LATE TO SAVE THEM, AND WILL IT BE ABLE TO
REPAIR ITSELF IF WE STOP IN TIME. ALSO HOW MANY CREATURES ARE
MADE EXTINCT EACH DAY.
MANY THANKS
C. GAMMAGE
ANSWER:
At present 1995-96 rates of deforestation, it would take 150 years to clear
ALL of the Amazon. the big problem is that these rates of clearing have
been increasing and so it would in reality take much less time if the
increasing trend continues.
Nobody really knows if the rainforest can recover itself. On an small scale
it can recover, but as more and more gets cut down, it will come to a point
of no return. this is on top of the big changes that we will feel before
all of it is cut down, changes in weather, rainfall, etc...
It is hard to say how many creatures are going extinct every day, because
we barely know 10% of them to start with. The truth and bottom line is that
there are probably many that go extinct each day and we don't even know it.
It is like buying new books and burning them before we even open them and
read them.
Good luck
Thanks.
Flying Monkeys
From:
Subject: flying monkeys
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 17:04:52 -0400
Back to top
QUESTION:
What can you tell me about flying monkeys? I heard that there are
monkeys that fly in the rainforest?
:
ANSWER:
There are no flying monkeys in the forest even though some of them
really seem to fly while jumping from one branch to another. In Africa you
can find squirels that have membranes beneath their arms which help them to
glide when jumping to other trees. Also you can find in the old tropics the
so called flying foxes which are really giant bats (you can see them in the
second Indiana Jones movie) called megachiroptes.
Cheers
Marcelo
Sloths
From:
Subject: sloths
Date: Sat, 29 May 1998 17:06:05 -0400
Back to top
QUESTION:
Why are sloths so slow ? I was just wondering.
ANSWER:
Sloths are bassically slow because they have low metabolisms. They
take a long time to consume the food they eat specially because of the
cellulose they consume from leaves. Interesting to note that they will only
go to the ground once a week were they defecate and disperse (without
knowing) seeds.
Cheers
Marcelo
Rainforest
From:
Subject: RAINFOREST
Date: Sat, 29 May 1998 17:07:50 -0400
Back to top
QUESTION:
SE REFLORESTARMOS UMA GRANDE REA HOJE, EM QUANTO TEMPO TERCDAMOS UMA
FLORESTA AADULTA E PRODUTIVA? E NESTE MESMO TEMPO, MAIS QUANTOS MILHD5ES,
OU BILHD5ES A MAIS DE SERES HUMANOS? OLHANDO O MAPA MUNDI, O PERCENTUAL
DE FLORESTAS ME PARECE BEM PEQUENO PARA AAFUTURA SUSTENTABILIDADE DO
PLANETA. E EU NO CONHEO OUTRO PLANETA HABITAVEL, NEM TEMOS TECNOLOGIA
PARA TENTAR AENCONTRAR ALGUM. CREIO QUE A COISA SEJA URGENTE. FAZER UMA
PEQUENA RETROSPECTIVA PRA VER.
:
ANSWER:
ainda nao sabemos quanto tempo demora para a flroesta se regenerar
completamente. certamente demora mais de 200-300 anos. neste mesmo tempo
tera 5-10 vezes o numero de pessoas na terra se nao controlarmos o
crescimento da populacoa.
tem razao, a area coberta por floresta na terra e pequena mas ela e muito
importante para nossa sobrevivencia,por causa da agua e do ar, entre outras
coisas.
boa sorte e continue se interessando pelo meio ambiente.
claude
Poisonous Snakes
From:
Subject: poisonous smakes
Date: Sat, 29 May 1998 17:11:39 -0400
Back to top
QUESTION:
How many species of poisonous smakes are found in the
rainforest?
:
ANSWER:
1. coral snakes which are very poisonous but not aggressive at all.
depending on where you are there could be 3-5 species of coral snakes.
2. Pit vipers or fer-de-lance snakes are poisonous but not as much as the
last type (see 3). there could be 3-4 speceis in a given area
3. Bushmaster snakes, the largest venomous snake in the AMazon. it can
reach 12 feet long and has a head the size of an adult's fist. it is fairly
aggressive but is so big that you usually see it before there is any danger.
cheers
How long can a bird go without eating food?
From:
Subject: How long can a bird go without eating food?
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 15:28:06 -0500
Back to top
QUESTION:
How long can a bird go without eating food?
:
ANSWER:
for most of the roughly 10,000 species of birds in the world, nobody has
that kind of detailed knowledge. certainly people who raise birds in
captivity (including zoos) will know about the birds they raise. but their
answers will depend on what they feed their birds and how active the birds
are in captivity. their answers might bear very little similarity to the
situation for wild birds. but we can piece together an answer about wild
birds from different sorts of clues.
first of all, it's important to recognize that different kinds of
birds will have differing tolerances for lack of food. the most important
characteristics affecting ability to go without food are metabolic rate
(how fast the bird burns up the calories in what it eats) and diet. in
general, little birds burn up their food much faster than big birds and so
need to eat more often. birds that consume sugar burn that up faster than
birds that eat protein-rich insects and animals or oily seeds and fruits.
hummingbirds are tiny birds that consume lots of nectar (sugar-water). they
need to eat almost constantly while they're awake and begin to look weak if
held in captivity for even an hour. however, hummingbirds also eat insects,
especially ones that they pluck out of spider webs (along with the spiders
themselves!), which give them longer-lasting energy. on the other hand,
hawks are big birds that eat animal flesh, and they can go days without a
successful hunt.
keep in mind that, in the wild, most birds spend most of their
waking hours looking for food. that suggests that their food is not easy to
find and that just the activity of foraging burns up much of what they
consume. diurnal birds (ones that are active during the day) typically
awaken at first light and begin singing. as soon as it is light enough to
see what they're doing, they start foraging for food. that suggests that
just going all night without eating has left them hungry.
but birds also have ways to conserve energy to survive periods of
food shortage. sleep allows even the most energetically demanding birds,
like hummingbirds, to go all night long without eating, even though they
eat constantly during the day. some hummingbirds are even known to survive
long cold spells (of days or weeks) by going into torpor, a state like
sleep in which their body temperature and metabolic rate drop and they do
nothing but sit still and wait for the weather to warm up. most birds that
depend on food supplies that are somewhat unpredictable in their
availability (like schools of fish for seabirds or insect hatches for
swifts) have fat stores to get them through times of shortage. migratory
birds, including the little warblers and thrushes that breed in north
america and winter in the tropics, build up big fat stores before migrating
in the spring and fall. this allows them to fly all night long without
stopping. some birds go all the way across the gulf of mexico in one
flight, without a break. these little migrants can nearly double their body
weight with fat during migration, so they can go without eating. if i
remember right, the most amazing case of fasting, are the penguins. when
they are incubating the egg or brooding the young chick (warming it with
their body) they cannot leave the nest at all. these parents go weeks in
freezing weather without eating or even moving much! (you might check an
encyclopedia on this to see if i've got it right.)
i suspect that the birds with the poorest ability to survive
without eating are the birds of the tropical rainforest understory. these
birds are adapted to a dark environment with very little food around
(almost no fruit in the understory and the insects there are carefully
camouflaged and hard to find). they have almost no fat stores at all. the
environment is fairly constant in its dark, muggy conditions, and they are
adapted to finding food in very peculiar and specialized ways (searching
inside curled dead leaves hanging in the vines, flying up to the undersides
of leaves in search of hiding insects, following army ants to find the
insects they scare up, and so on). these birds forage virtually all day
long everyday. although they are extremely good at finding food in a fairly
poor and challenging environment, they depend on that environment being
just as it always has been for the thousands or millions of years during
which they evolved their specialized ways of feeding. they are very
sensitive to change and are the first birds to disappear when rainforest is
disturbed in any way by human activities. i suspect one the biggest reasons
for this is because they can't go long without food and can't find food in
forest that's at all altered.
i haven't been very specific about exactly how many hours or days a
bird can go without eating. partly that's because i don't know the exact
answer and partly because the answer will be different for different kinds
of birds. i think almost any bird in good health should be able to survive
24 hours without food if it is not stressed by extreme heat or cold or
forced to expend a lot of energy. the other day a ruddy quail-dove (a
small, tropical pigeon) flew into the window of my house and was stunned. i
left in on my back porch where the neighborhood cats couldn't get to it.
later, i discovered that its legs were paralyzed. it could fly weakly, but
couldn't walk or even sit upright. it sat in one spot on my porch without
food or water for 3 days before it disappeared. maybe at one time you've
found a bird that a cat has caught, and then tried to keep it at home. i
used to do this, and i found these birds wouldn't eat what i gave them and
would last only a day or two. i suspect 2 or 3 days without food for a
small bird is about what you can expect.
