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Today, we know that the soil of the tropical rainforests is thin and very low in nutrients. Decomposers like leaf-cutter ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi quickly turn falling leaves and dead organisms into nutrients. Plants take up these nutrients the moment they are available, so they don’t get a chance to enrich the soil. Keeping Tropical Rainforests Healthy Conservation of tropical rainforests should be easy. They have survived for millions of years. The trick to keeping them healthy is to not take too much too fast. This gives the rainforests time to recover from human activities like logging. But many countries that have tropical rainforests are poor. They can make money by cutting down and developing the rainforests. But uncontrolled development results in deforestation

Rainforests have 170,000 of the world's 400,000 known plant species. The United States has 81 species of frogs, while Madagascar (which is smaller than Texas) may have 300 species. Europe has 321 butterfly species, while Manu National Park in the tropical rainforest of Peru has 1,300 species! The world’s only species of flying snake and lizard live in the Borneo rainforest. The largest catfish in the world lives in a tropical rainforest river in Vietnam. It weighs over 300 kg. About one-quarter of all the medicines we use come from rainforest plants. Curare comes from a tropical vine. It is used as an anesthetic and to relax muscles during heart surgery. Quinine, from the cinchona tree, is used to treat malaria. A person with leukemia has a 99% chance that the disease will go into remission because of the rosy periwinkle. More than 1,400 varieties of tropical plants might be potential cures for cancer.

Some traditional rainforest cultures still live in the forests. They travel as a group to collect and hunt food. As rainforests are destroyed, so are the homes of these interesting and amazing people.