Differentiate between the way in which living things adapt in the desert and in the tropical rain forest ecosystems.
Answers
Answer:Tropical Rainforests
Tropical rainforests are ecosystems located near the Earth's equator that receive between 60 and 160 inches of rain every year. A long rainy system? Not at all. Tropical rainforests get this rain month after month, fairly evenly distributed throughout the year. Most warm rainforests are found in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa.
The constant mild temperatures combined with ample moisture makes tropical rainforests an ideal living environment for many types of plants, insects and animals. In fact, you won't find a biome having greater biodiversity.
Dry Deserts
Many people who live far from deserts consider this biome a wasteland of sand and hot, drying sunlight, with perhaps a gnarled cactus or two in the landscape. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is, almost 20 percent of the planet's land is desert, and not all of them are alike. Yes, a desert, by definition, gets 10 to 20 inches of rain per year, so all are dry. But you'll find that there are various types of deserts (hot and dry, semiarid, coastal and cold), and all of them teem with amazing life. Large mammals aren't desert dwellers, mainly because they don't have a system in their bodies to store water. But smaller mammals, reptiles, insects and plant life abound.
Explanation:
Explanation:
Adventure travelers collect biomes the way kids on a road trip collect state license plates on passing cars. Biome seekers plan their lives so that they can experience the planet's most exotic regions and ecosystems. Two stars on any biome list are tropical rainforests and deserts. Although the two are opposites in many ways, most notably the amount of precipitation they receive, they both are incredibly rich in plant and animal life. A trip to either would be unforgettable.
Tropical Rainforests
Tropical rainforests get this rain month after month, fairly evenly distributed throughout the year. Most warm rainforests are found in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Sun-Reaching Plants
A lot of the plants in the rainforest climb to reach the sun, while some on the floor of the forest – heterotrophs – evolved as non-photosynthetic plants that don’t have the sun requirements of other plants. Air plants, or epiphytes, evolved to live high up on trees to gain moisture and nutrients with less competition, while woody vines, or lianas, climb rapidly up trees to areas where the canopy is open. Stranglers start out as air plants, but once up high in the trees, they send roots down to the forest floor in search of nutrients. Rainforests produce a variety of trees, bromeliads, climbers, stranglers and plants that don’t require as much sun.
Desert Survival Mechanisms
Desert plants evolved to get as much water and nutrients out of their environments as possible. Thorny bushes and plants protect against water predators, while mesquite bushes and trees developed long taproots – up to 30 feet – to retrieve as much water as possible from supplies beneath the ground. Other desert plants have shallow root systems that spread wide beneath the ground to collect as much water as possible when it rains. Succulents thrive because they store water within their fleshy innards for periods of drought. Some annual and perennial plants don’t produce plants every year, as their hard-cased seeds can survive through many seasons of drought before the conditions are right for their growth.
Thriving Rainforest Plants
With rainfall that occurs regularly throughout the year, many plants grow in a rainforest, and competition is steep for the sun and nutrients in the ground. Like deserts, rainforest soils don’t have a lot of nutrients because of how fast nutrients cycle, and thick three-layered canopies prevent the sun from reaching the lower levels of the forest. Plants in a rainforest evolved to have broad waxy leaves that easily shed rainwater for respiration purposes, but open wide to collect energy from the sun.