Ecology

Take a walk in the rain forest. It's hot and humid and humming with life. Look up into the dense canopy of leaves above you. Tangled vines lead to the treetops, where parrots squawk and monkeys swing from branch to branch.

Get ready ­ a spectacular adventure awaits you in the jungles of the Amazonian rainforest. Your journey begins now! RAINFOREST EXPLORER is packed with information about the world¹s most complex ecosystem.

Biosphere 2 was built nearly thirty years ago to develop technologies for human living in space and on other worlds. Eight biospherians survived sealed inside the engineered ecosystem for two years. The results of the mission were mixed, but they definitely succeeded in constructing a research facility like none other in the world.

In Elkhorn Slough, an inlet on the California coast, seagrass grows healthy and strong in the shallow water, providing homes for fish, preventing erosion, and trapping carbon from the environment.

This healthy seagrass baffled marine biologist Brent Hughes. Water in the slough is chock-full of nutrients from fertilizer runoff on nearby farms. Normally, nutrient-polluted water supports huge population of algae that block sunlight from reaching the seagrass, and the seagrass dies. Why has the slough's seagrass thriving?