What does the Congo Rainforest look like?

In my head, the rainforest is very dense with ginormous, overgrowing, beautiful plants of many different shapes and sizes. The colours would be all different types of green, pinks, oranges and yellows. And all the trees trunks would be a dark gloomy brown. 

There's not very much space for the plants to grow, so they all grow on top of each other and around each other. Plants need sunlight, so they all reach upwards and sometimes outwards to get as much sunlight as possible.

There are 10,000 plant species in the Congo rainforest and three out of every ten you find are only found there.


The rainforest has layers of different vegetation. The first one is the forest floor where you will find the start of tree trunks and the stems of plants. Its also were the main mammals and insects can be found.

Next is the understory, where the little trees are, as well as the ends of floor plants.

The canopy is were all the light gets blocked by the leaves of taller trees which grow together to make a shelter for animals and birds.

The final layer is the emergents which are the ones that stick out of the top and they are the biggest trees.

If you look down at your feet in the Congo Rainforest you might see a Bromeliad. Did you know Bromeliads have bent leaves to help them absorb water? The scientific name for a Bromeliad is Bromeliaceae.


If you look straight ahead in the Congo Rainforest you can see the Kapok tree, the Kapok tree can grow up to 200 feet in height. The Kapok tree can also be known as the ceiba tree. The roots of the tree are massive. They look like running lava. And the trunk above them sometimes has big spikes on it.


Nicholas School Ph.D. student Graden Froese admires a forest giant in Ivindo National Park, Gabon. Credit: Duke Research Blog

If you look up in the Congo Rainforest you might the Strangler fig growing up a tree like spaghetti wound up on a fork. There is around 150 species of Strangler Fig and the often get so big that they kill the tree that they are growing on.

Image credit. 

If you are an African Grey parrot flying above the Congo Rainforest, to me, it looks like the top of a piece of broccoli. And you can also see that there are settlements there, hidden in the trees. you would see snake-like rivers and lots of trees.



Image credit - George Vlad




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