By Cindy M., Ms. Ou's Class

When you enter the rainforest you feel like the air is still and damp. You also feel moist under your feet. The tallest trees grow so high you can barely see their tops 30 or 40 meters above your head. The trees are so big that they block all the sun. In the rainforest the daily sun lights last about twelve hours a day. The daily temperature is about twenty-seven degrees Celsius. And the yearly rainfall is at least two hundred centimeters.

Today the rainforest covers less than five percent of the earthÕs surface. Each rainforest has nearly half of the earth's species. One ten square kilometer patch of rainforest supports up to seven hundred and fifty species. In a hectar there could be forty-two thousand little insects.

The Amazon river has the biggest variety of animals. African rainforests have some of the largest animals like the gorilla. Rainforest in Asia have many animals that live on the forest floor and not in the trees. In a rainforest there are over sixty types of frogs, four hundred birds, one hundred reptiles, one hundred fifty butterflies, and one thousand five hundred different kinds of plants.

For thousands of years, people have lived in the rainforest with the plants and animals. The people that lived before used the plants to make medicine when people were sick. The people who used to live in the rainforest lived in harmony with plants, animals, air, and water around them to help them survive. To help the trees grow faster, the farmers sometimes burned small patches of trees. Ashes from the burned plants contain nutrients that farmers mix into the poor soil of the rainforest. They can farm the patch for a few years before the nutrients are used up. In a rainforest, plants grow rapidly in the warm wet soil even though the soil is poor and shallow.

Some people say that by year two thousand more than half of these forests will be gone. As the rainforest disappears, thousands of animals disappear with them. Some scientists say that more than one million species will become extinct in the next twenty-five years. India is one of the countries that has cut nearly all of its rainforest.

Some people that live in the rainforest are raising iguanas for food. Iguanas live in the rainforest plants. The iguanas have been part of the Central American diet. Iguanas are often cooked in stews. These days a small group of farmers in Costa Rica are raising and releasing them into the nearby rainforest. In Ghana Africa, people are planting trees on land once covered by forest. Through the Ghana national tree planting program, farmers have planted more than three thousand trees of hectares every year since 1983.

Jaguars in Central and South American rainforest roam over many miles. Some scientists say that five hundred adult jaguars need at least twenty thousand square kilometers of space, and area almost big as Massachusetts. Right now the rainforest covers about seven thousand hectares.