So being a wildlife biology student obviously the stunning array of birds, insects, and…

So being a wildlife biology student obviously the stunning array of birds, insects, and arachnids was a highlight of my trip to Ecuador – but at the heart of the rainforest are of course plants, and many of these caught my eye too!
This photo might look like it’s just of grass, but that’s actually part of a Bamboo species called chusquea! This tall flexible bamboo is very common in the cloud forest, and it’s bendy stems often tangled together to form almost impenetrable walls of vegetation across our path. When you looked closely though, it was spectacularly beautiful hiding many unique critters in it’s leaves.
Chusquea also often demonstrated a really cool adaption many rainforest plants have called ‘guttation’. In biology class we’re often so focused on how species evolve to survive nutrient deprivation, I’d never really thought much about what might happen if there was too much of a nutrient. But in the cloud forest that’s exactly what’s happening – there’s so much water everywhere that plants like the chusquea actually have to get rid of some, excreting the excess water from tiny pores at the tips of their leaves! It looks very similar to dew in the morning but you can recognize it because the droplets are only at the tips of the leaves, rather than all over the plant body! *
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