What Are Different Ways Rainforest Animals Find Their Food?

Hunters

• The rainforest hosts a great variety of hunting animals. The principle mammalian hunters are big cats such as tigers, leopards and jaguars, which track prey with their fierce sense of smell, acute hearing and sharp eyes. However, there are many other hunting species, including crocodiles and alligators, which tend to wait in the shallow water at the edge of watering holes, ambushing animals which come to drink. Snakes are one of the most prolific hunting species in the rainforest with hundreds of varieties spread across the globe. Snakes track their prey by smell, collecting particles on their forked tongues and moving them to the sense organs in the mouth. The fork allows them to sense the direction of the prey by sensing the discrepancy in strength of the smell between the two forks. Tree-dwelling snakes also have good eyesight and some species can even sense infrared. The harpy eagle is also a rainforest dweller, using its powerful eyesight to hunt down monkeys and sloths.

Herbivores

• Many species of rainforest animals are herbivores and live off the abundance of fruit and vegetation. This can allow for a very sedentary lifestyle like that of the sloth, which has little difficulty finding its food but moves slowly from one tree to the next. Other fruit eating mammals in the rainforest include monkeys and other primates which use smell, vision and their powerful memories to find and return to fruiting trees. Parrots are abundant in the rainforests, particularly in South America and Australia. Parrots have a fairly omnivorous diet. They live mainly on seeds, which their specially adapted beaks can easily crack open.

Ants

• Ants are more abundant than any other animal species in the rainforest. In fact, the biomass of ants in the rainforest is more than double that of all the mammal species combined. There are a great number of ant species and they use an astonishing array of techniques to derive food. Leafcutter ants harvest large volumes of leaf matter which they use to cultivate underground fungus gardens, which provide them with food. By contrast, army ants live a nomadic existence. They do not even settle long enough to lay down a permanent nest, but live instead in a bivouac constructed from the living bodies of the ants themselves. The reason for this extreme nomadism is that the army ants will gather and consume everything they can physically carry within a given radius of their temporary home, moving on once food supplies are exhausted.

Detritivores

• The importance of detritivores to the rainforest ecosystem cannot be overestimated. These are small animals such as worms, springtails, amphipods, mites, millipedes and snails which live in the thick leaf mold on the rainforest floor. These animals feed off fallen leaves, fruit and rotting wood, extracting and further breaking down nutrients. This helps to cycle the nutrients back into the soil to be absorbed by the mass of vegetation.