The Amazon rainforest spans about 5.500.000 km² and represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforests.
The Lungs of the Earth
The Amazon is home to the largest collection of living plants and animal species in the world, with at least one in ten known species living here. The estimated 390 million individual trees and the 6,400 km long river are home to 2.5 million insect species and up to 80,000 plant species growing in the region.
To put that into perspective: Northern Europe has about 40 different tree species, in the Amazon you’ll see more than 16,000. Due to the sheer mass of trees and plants the floor of the forest is wrapped in darkness. When it rains it takes up to ten minutes before the water reaches the ground.
Due to the rich vegetation your time in the Amazon will be spent breathing the cleanest air you’ll find: About 20% of the world’s oxygen is produced by the Amazonian plants, filtering carbon dioxide out of the air. This is the reason why the forest is also called “Lungs of the Earth”.
Animals in the Amazon rainforest
On your cruise the water around you is bursting with life, over 3000 fish species have already been discovered here and the number is constantly rising. In fact one in five fish species of the world live in the Amazonian rivers and streams. Many of the fish have adopted a frugivory diet, feeding primarily on fruits and seeds that fall into the river.
Other fish like the well known piranhas primarily feed on tourists that fall from their ships. While many movies would have you believe this, most piranha species are actually vegetarian and pose little risk to swimmers. If they were as vicious as they are often portrayed in popular media, the rivers would be devoid of any other fish. A greater danger comes in the form of electric eels. These blind fish can grow up to 1.8 meters long and deliver electric shocks of up to 650 volts.
Other more harmless water-dwellers that can be observed in the Amazonian rivers are the pink river dolphin, and the giant otter, both of which actually like to feed on piranhas. The giant otter is the rarest mammal in the Amazon forest, once hunted for their fur, they now only thrive in the remotest areas of the jungle. If you’re going to see one, you’re going to hear it first: They are described as one of the noisiest animals here, constantly communicating with their peers.
The airspace here is also densely populated. Over one third of the world’s bird species compete for space and food in the canopy. The treetop world is less studied than the ocean floor, and may be home to millions of undiscovered species. Scientists believe that up to half of the world’s species live here.
Image(from left to right, top-down): Tucan, Hummingbird, Harpy Eagle, Jaguar
One of the most impressive inhabitants is the Harpy Eagle, which grows over a meter tall, and has a wingspan of up to two meters. As carnivore it prefers to feed on sloths and monkeys, but will also settle for other birds.
The polar opposite are the small Hummingbirds. They feed on nectar which is rich in calories and allows for a very high metabolism. Their heartbeats reach up to 1,260 beats per minute enabling them to beat their wings 80 times a second.
400 mammal species call the Amazon rainforest their home, among others the biggest cat of the American continents: Jaguars. The Jaguar is an apex-predator of the highest calibre - it can swim, climb trees, jump as far as our best athletes and sprint at 80 km/h - almost twice as fast as the fastest humans. Jaguars are opportunistic hunters, preferring large prey, but since the Amazon has a higher diversity of small animals the Jaguar's diet consists of over 80 different species.
Civilization
For a long time it was thought that the poor soil in the Amazon didn't allow for large populations, as agriculture was not possible. Nowadays it is believed that up to 5 million people lived in the Amazon region in 1500, a civilization that was later decimated by the arrival of European diseases. Today at least 30 million people live in the Amazon, about 10% of which are indigenous, with still more than 60 largely isolated tribes living in the region.
In the 1960s farmers started cultivating crops in the Amazon. However the soil here is only productive for a short period of time, forcing the farmers to move and clear more and more forest, causing extensive environmental damage in the process.
In the 1970s construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway started. The highway was intended to make the largely empty areas of the Amazon more accessible and connect those regions to the rest of the country. Due to the remoteness of the highway the construction was very expensive, because of the high costs and the financial crisis at the time, large parts of the highway are left unfinished. The highway has indirectly caused a lot of deforestation because it has made the forest more accessible to logging companies.
Many controversial transportation projects that are currently being developed in the Amazon are being justified by the needs of soy farmers: Brazil is the second-largest producer of soybeans after the USA. Research has shown however, that the more rainforest is logged, the less precipitation reaches the area lowering the yield per hectare.
Deforestation is a danger to the indigenous tribes, the animals and plants of the Amazon but also to the rest of the world, as the Amazon is an important regulating force of the global climate. Not only will less carbon dioxide be decomposed, the forest also stores 90-140 billion metric tons of carbon, which could significantly accelerate global warming if only a portion would be released.
Amazon River
As mentioned before the Amazon River is about 6,400 km long, the second longest river on earth. Narrowly losing out to the 6,600 km long Nile. The measuring of a river’s length is not an exact science, as it is not easy to determine where a river actually starts and ends.
Case in point: For nearly a century the headwaters of the Apurimac River had been considered the Amazon's most distant source, but in 2014 a study found that it would actually be the Cordillera Rumi Cruz at the headwaters of the Mantaro River. Because of this the length of the Amazon is disputed with some researchers claiming that it is longer than the Nile.
What can be said about the Amazon river with absolute certainty, is that it's the largest river by discharge of water. The Amazon represents about 20% of the global riverine discharge to the Ocean, more than the next seven largest rivers combined. Its drainage basin, spanning almost half of the South American Continent, is of course also the largest in the world, at 7,000,000 km². For comparison: all of Europe spans only 10,000,000 km².
During the wet season the water rises an average of 9 meters, making the river up to 190 km wide in some parts, flooding the surrounding land. Not all of this water comes from the torrential rainfall that pours for four months though, a lot of it is actually melted ice from the Andes.
While hectares over hectares of land are flooded, some plants are flowing with the stream. What starts as plants growing on other vegetation that fell into the water, can accumulate enough organic matter to grow forest patches spanning several hectares in area: actual floating islands.
The only small thing about the Amazon river is the number of bridges: zero. Despite its impressive length there are no bridges crossing the river at any point. And while at some points bridges would be practically impossible or at least very, very costly, the absence of bridges is mostly due to the absence of need for them. For the most part the river flows through the rainforest where there are very few cities and roads that would have to be connected, and more often the river is the road.
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