15 Things You Did Not Know About The Amazon Rain Forest
Here are some of the most bizarre facts about the amazon rain forest that will amaze you about the natural habitat.
The Amazon rain forest habitat is unique and cannot be found anywhere else. It is a fascinating place, teeming with incredible biodiversity. There, you may find some of the world's most odd and amazing species, as well as a wealth of informative, entertaining, and unexpected information. The most interesting facts are as follows.
Spanish adventurer Francisco Orellana gave the region its current name, "Amazon," after being attacked by female warriors known as the Icamiabas. Like the Amazons from Greek mythology, he said.
If somehow the Amazon rainforest were a nation, it would rank fourteenth in size at 5.5 million km2, making it slightly larger than Saudi Arabia but significantly bigger than Mexico.
The Amazon rainforest is responsible for creating almost 20% of the oxygen used by humans.
Only about 1% of both the trees & herbal medicines in the Amazon were ever studied by scientists, even though 25% of all western medications are based on chemicals from the jungle.
More than 3,000 different fruits may be found in the Amazonian jungle. In the West, we consume just 200 of them every year.
The Amazon rainforest is responsible for producing more than 80% of the world's food supply.
There are over 40,000 different kinds of plants there, and of those, 16,000 are native trees. More than 500 species of trees & 1,500 species of plants may thrive in only one hectare (2.47 acres) of the rainforest.
At least 30 percent of all known species are found in the Amazon, and a new one is discovered there every three days. It is home to 5% of the world's avian population, which includes 3,000 types of fish, 2.5 million insect taxonomies, and a variety of other insects. You could find more ant species in a single shrub than in the whole British Isles.
We tend to forget that the Amazon is also home to a permanent human population of 21 million—roughly the same size as that of London, New York, and Los Angeles put together. Manaus, Brazil (2 million inhabitants) and Belém, Brazil are Brazil's two largest conurbations (1.4m).
Around 40% of the area of South America is covered by the Amazon rainforest.
There are nine different nations from which one might explore the Amazon: Brazil, Colombia, Amazon, Venezuela, Ecuadorian, Bolivia, or the three Guyanas.
Less than one percent of the sunlight can reach the forest floor because the trees are so dense.
Although deforestation in the Amazon has decreased in recent years, in 2020 rates were the greatest they have been in a decade, at 11,088 sq km destroyed in Brazil in a single year, an area about seven times the extent of London. It is believed that we are responsible for the extinction of around 137 species every single day.
Loss of the Amazon rainforest accounts for around 30 percent of our carbon emissions.
Plants need both water and enough phosphorus in the topsoil if they are to develop healthily and steadily over time. NASA utilized satellite imagery to trace four models of huge dust clouds bearing the fertilizer on a trans-Atlantic trek from the Desert in Africa toward the Amazon Rainforest.
