 Hi everyone! Hi, welcome to this Curious Kids Live event on Rainforests. I'm Grace Allen, I run the Curious Kids articles and events for the conversation, and we publish lots of articles where we get world experts to write answers to the questions that children send us, but today we're doing things a bit differently and we've got experts here with us to answer your questions live. So, thank you very much for joining us to talk about Rainforests and an extra special thank you if you've sent us a question, we have some great questions that have come in, and if you think of a question while we're talking, you can type it in the chat box or ask your parent or teacher to type it in for you, and we'll do our best to answer it. So, I'm joined by two experts on Rainforests, Dr Liana Tua from Brunel University London and Dr Louise Gentel from Nottingham Trent University, and to just get going I'm going to ask them a bit about what is they know about Rainforests. So, Liana, you've traveled to Rainforests as part of your work, what was that like and what were you doing when you were in the Rainforest? Okay, hi everyone. So, I'm a social anthropologist which basically means that I try to understand how different people around the world think and feel and live and act as part of bigger groups like, you know, villages, communities, religious communities, or countries, and so most of my work has been done on the island of Borneo, it's the third largest island in the world, and it's also one of the two places in the world where you can still find orangutans, and I work with an indigenous group there called the Bideu, I've been working with them for nearly 20 years. So, as part of my research with these people who live in and around the rainforest of Borneo, I've been living with them, I've been learning their language, I've been planting rice with them, going to the river with them, basically traveling through the rainforest and trying to understand their lives, and more recently a couple of colleagues and I have been trying to understand how people in rural Borneo, a different part of rural Borneo, think about orangutans but also think about the people who are trying to save them conservationists. So, what's it like being in the rainforest in Borneo? It's very hot, it's very sticky, it's very very damp because there's a sort of downpour pretty much every day, it's quite dark because there's not much sunlight that gets through the canopy, and you don't necessarily see lots of creatures but you can hear them really really well, the jungle is a really noisy place but I think the thing that I enjoy most about doing research in the jungle with people is that I've learned to see the jungle, you know the rainforest, trees, plants, rivers, mountains and so on, as places that people really live in and use, so you know I might see a clump of trees and I think oh that's a clump of trees, but someone else might say no that's actually Peter's mother's farm or you know that's where the old village used to be, and so I think you know when you start to do this sort of research you very very quickly realise that the rainforest is not just about animals and plants, it's also very much about people and I guess that's what my research is about. Thanks Leana. Louise, you're an expert on animals and what is it that makes you interested in rainforest animals in particular? Hi everybody, I'm a zoologist and I work in conservation, the thing about the rainforest is just the sheer number of species that there are there, so you've got invertebrates, you've got butterflies, you've got beetles, you've got loads of reptiles and amphibians, so things like snakes, frogs and toads, then you've got amazing birds and then you've got the mammals as well, so there is absolutely everything in the rainforest, it's the ideal conditions for these animals, so about 50% of the world species that we know of live in the rainforest because it's the perfect place for them, and the animals that live there are amazing because as Leana said it is so dark there, you've got animals that are actually really brightly coloured so that they can show off to each other perfectly, you've got loads and loads of noises happening as well, so it's a really exciting place to be. That's great, right, so let's get going, the whole point of curious kids is that we answer kids questions, so we've got a question that's probably a really good place to start, this one's from Emma, she's six, she sent this question in along with some questions from her big sister too, and Emma's question is, what is a rainforest? A rainforest, well there's a little bit of a clue in the name, right, so a rainforest is basically a very dense forest, so a forest where lots of trees and plants grow very very closely together that grows in very wet parts of the world, so places that get lots of rainfall, hence rainforest, and actually the interesting thing is that you can find rainforests all over the world, you can find them, apparently I've just discovered on every single continent in the world, apart from Antarctica, so you can find them in places like the United States, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, China, and even the UK, and sort of bonus points to anyone out there who can tell us where we have rainforest in this country, and so there are different kinds of rainforest, you can find rainforests in mountains, these are sometimes called cloud forests, you can find temperate rainforests which you find in countries where there are different seasons, but I think the most important and the largest rainforest that you tend to find in the world are what we call tropical rainforests, and these are rainforests that you find in areas all around the equator, so that sort of imaginary line that goes around the middle of the planet, in very very warm regions like Southeast Asia, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific, and so tropical rainforests are quite interesting because they're rainforests that are both wet and hot all year round, which means that trees and plants can grow really really well in them, trees and plants really like these sorts of conditions, and by this I don't just mean a few species of trees and plants, I mean hundreds of species of trees and plants, as well as hundreds of animals and insects and other life forms that exist within them, so in that sense you know tropical rainforests, but rainforests in general are really special because they're incredibly biodiverse, which means they've got lots of different species of life forms living together in the same space, and so I guess in that sense we could also think about rainforests as beings of treasure troves of life. Thanks Leanne. So we've had quite a few questions, quite a lot of you want to know about animals that live in the rainforest, and we've got one from Madeleine, she's nine, and thank you very much Madeleine for sending the question. She says, why do animals in the rainforest have fur if it's so hot? Maybe this one is one for you Louise. Okay that's a really good question, so if it's so hot why aren't these animals stripped off to something like, well if it was us it would be a swimming costume because that's going to make us cool down, but actually what the fur does is it offers the animals some protection. So it protects the animals from the heat, so if you have got some fur it stops the heat going on to your actual body. If you've got some fur it's going to protect you from the sun, so it protects you from being sunburnt. It's also going to protect you from the rain as well, so it rains quite a lot, and lots of animals with fur once it has finished raining they can just shake and the rain just comes off them, so it doesn't really go through the fur. There are also other ways or other reasons that they've got fur, so they can use fur as protection, so almost like you wearing clothes it's going to stop you scraping yourself and getting lots of cuts and bruises. It's also going to protect you against other animals, so things that might want to bite you, lots of insects, lots of parasites, things like that, and the other reason that animals are going to have fur is possibly so that they can have some either bright coloration or more usually camouflage. So if you think of something like a jaguar it's got beautiful fur but it's all really camouflage, so it blends in with its environment and then it compounds on its prey. That's really interesting, thank you. And here's another animal question from Alfie who's five and from Newcastle. Thanks very much Alfie and he wants to know about boa constrictors and what they like to eat. So what is a boa constrictor and what does it like to eat? Hi Alfie, thanks for the question. So a boa constrictor is a really long snake, so they get to around three meters long. They're not quite as long as the green anacondas I think they can get to about four meters long, but a boa constrictor is a snake that will bite and it will grab hold of its prey with its teeth and then its body will wrap around the animal and it's got really strong muscles so it will gradually squeeze until it suffocates the animal. So it eats loads of things, basically whatever it can get its hands on it will eat monkeys, it will eat birds, it will eat frogs. It rarely would eat a human. So it's really nothing to worry about at all, but it can eat some quite large animals and it needs to open its mouth really, really wide to be able to swallow them whole. There is a fun fact about boa constrictors. So a boa constrictor is the only vertebrate animal that is known by its scientific name. So most animals have a common name as well as a scientific name. So something like a house mouse, its scientific name is musculos, but we know it as the house mouse. The boa constrictor doesn't have a common name, so the only one known by its scientific name. That's really interesting. And another question on animals in the rainforest from Taylor who would like to know, have there been any recently discovered animals in the rainforest? Okay, so Taylor, there are so many animals in the rainforest and there's actually so little that we already know about it that animals are being discovered all the time. So just in the past year, there are things like a small lemur, a mouse lemur, so a very small one that was discovered. And I found out earlier today actually that there is a new pit viper that's been discovered in the rainforest and this one's been named after one of the Harry Potter characters. So if you can remember the name of the Slytherin, so Salazar Slytherin, so the new pit viper is called Salazar's pit viper and that was only found last year. Wow. So here's an interesting question and it comes from Libgate Junior School. Hi Libgate Junior School, if you're watching. They would like to know if either of you have ever seen a rainforest animal in its natural habitat. So Liana, what about you? Have you seen what animals have you been in their natural habitat? I think I've probably heard more animals that I've seen in the natural habitat because as I say, the rainforest is dark and it's noisy. But yeah, I have seen several animals in the natural habitat and I guess the most memorable occasion was probably about 10 years ago when my husband and I were walking through this jungle, this trail in the rainforest of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo and this was a trail that was very overgrown. It hadn't been used by very many people and we've been walking for quite a long time. Our feet were covered in leeches, so leeches are little kind of wormy creatures that basically suck on the blood of animals as a means of eating. And these guys hadn't eaten for quite a long time and so we had about 20 leeches on our feet at the time and we're getting a grouchy, not really looking very hard of where we were going. And so we were stomping through this very overgrown patch when my husband took this really big step forward and suddenly there was this incredible noise in the grass and right in front of him, literally about two feet away from him, this enormous snake kind of leapt up vertically like that and then flipped over backwards and slid it off into the stream right next to it. And we obviously gave each other a bit of a fright, but this snake was absolutely huge. It was about the width of two grown arms and it must have been more than six foot long, but it was just extremely well camouflaged and it was probably lying in wait for a tasty prey and unfortunately we just, we ruined it. So yeah, that was an interesting encounter. Wow, were you scared? I think we were too shocked to be scared. What about you, Louise? I think my most memorable one, I was with one of my friends and we were actually going for a bit of a jog, so we were running along and we do tend to look out for the animals or at least, you know, search for them quite a lot. So this was a time when we weren't really searching, so we were just running and then my friend just suddenly stopped, kind of stopped at the same time. Look, what's that up there? And we realized there was a black and white collar bus monkey, so this was in the forest in Africa and we saw one and then we suddenly realized that actually there was a whole troop of them, so maybe about 30, they were all ranging, so there were some adults, there were some little ones and then all of a sudden we could hear this noise and it was like a trickling of water and I thought, oh, I didn't realize we were near some sort of river or anything and then actually I looked up and there was one of the monkeys really quite close just on top of us and it was going to the toilet, so it was weeing right in front of us and we had to move out of the way, but it was a really great experience and definitely a memorable one. Wow, okay. All right, moving on from the animal we, this is from Zach and nine-year-old Zach would like to know, what is the deadliest animal in the rainforest? Hi, Zach, good question. There are lots of deadly animals in the rainforest and I think it depends what you mean by deadly, so there are deadly animals like the jaguar who's going to pounce on its prey, tigers in some rainforest like the ones I got on my t-shirt here, there are plenty of deadly snakes, so there are vipers, there are rattlesnakes, there are deadly amphibians as well, but I think if you're looking at the ones that are deadliest to humans or kill the most humans, there is the poison dart frog, so I think the deadliest one of those is the golden poison dart frog and this is what a lot of the indigenous people use on their weapons, so things like arrows so that they can kill things, the poison dart frogs actually eat venomous things or the things which are toxic and then it makes their skin toxic, so if you were to, maybe I don't think you would do, but if you're going to lick a frog then certainly there is enough venom on that skin, it's been reported to kill 10 adult humans, so just from one poison dart frog, so that is pretty deadly, but the thing that I think kills the most people in the forest is the mosquitoes because of the different diseases that it carries, so things like malaria, but in terms of deadly I think you've got things like the poison dart frog, pretty cool, they're also really brightly coloured as well, so it's warning coloration to warn you that they are deadly, so things like bees and wasps have got the striped yellow and black warning coloration, the poison dart frogs, you've got ones that are bright blue, maybe red, green and quite often with blacks on them as well, so that is a warning to other animals, stay away, I'm deadly. And Leana what do you think what's the most deadly animal in the rainforest? Yeah, I think we also need to think a little bit about what we define as animals and I'm going to be a real sort of social anthropologist here and say that humans are animals too, and in some ways we could also think about humans as being extremely powerful animals that are able to shape the rainforest in many many different ways, but it's also quite important to kind of figure out which humans were talking about here, right, so if we're talking about humans who've lived in the rainforest for a very long time, yeah, they kill animals, they hunt animals, they eat animals, they use trees and other resources from the forest to live, and they've been doing that for many many years, this is just part of life in the rainforest, and generally speaking those humans are pretty good at not being too deadly even though they're pretty good at actually, you know, kind of using what they need from the rainforest to survive. I think where things get a little bit trickier is where you've got other humans who come in and change the rainforest in very big and very quick ways, you know, when for example you've got very large areas of rainforest that are very quickly cleared and sort of raised, burnt for huge plantations, for mining, for new dams or new roads, these are pretty massive projects and very often they are important to the country in various ways, but if they're not done carefully they can cause a lot of damage not only to the forests themselves but also to the people who live in them, and so I guess that is one way we could also think about, you know, the influence of one particular animal on the fate of the rainforest and humans can be pretty deadly. Yeah, so when the trees that chop down this is what we mean when we talk about deforestation, right, and I know that if you're learning about rainforest at school you might be covering deforestation, and we've got a question on deforestation from Adam and he wants to know, is deforestation always a bad thing? So Leanne, is it always a bad thing when trees in the rainforest are cut down? Thank you, Adam. That's a really, really good and really important question. Yeah, so deforestation is basically any sort of activity that involves getting rid of trees from forests by cutting them down, by clearing them, you know, by burning them so that the land can then be used for other things like farming or plantations or, you know, building new villages and stuff. And I've probably given you a little bit of a hint in my previous answer, but I would say that deforestation is not necessarily a bad thing. We have to remember that rainforests have always been used by humans for many, many centuries. They've always cut down trees, you know, for their tools to build their houses. They've always burned in cleared areas of land for their farming to grow their crops. This is all pretty normal. And generally speaking, you know, most communities that live in the rainforest have a pretty good idea of how to manage their land and to use it sustainably, right? So how to use the forest so that it's still able to grow back and recover rather than being completely destroyed. So for example, the people I work with in Borneo are rice planters. And what they do is every year, they will clear and burn a piece of land for their rice farms and to grow their vegetables and stuff. And they might cultivate, they might grow rice on that piece of land for one or two years. And then the next year, they'll sort of move on to another piece of land and clear that and leave the previous piece of land to kind of grow back and recover. And what you tend to find is that because they've got quite a lot of land in this area, every piece of land gets about seven to 10 years to recover. And so that means that they're able to sort of farm sustainably without actually damaging the environment too much. I think it tends to get a little bit trickier when we start looking at deforestation on a really large scale. You know, when as I said, you start clearing these huge tracts of rainforest to create plantations or mines or build dams or roads. And I think it's important to say that these projects are not necessarily bad. You know, in the sense that I think it is reasonable for countries to want to use their forest resources to give their citizens a better life. You know, these are very often important sources of income for people who live in rainforests. And people who live in rainforests also want to have roads and electricity and pipe water and access to clinics and schools and stuff. So we can't really say that they can't have that just to sort of save the rainforest. And I suppose the real challenge here is how to make sure that you're able to use that rainforest carefully and also to ensure that the people who live in it, you know, are sort of being healthy and that they're doing all right without causing the complete destruction of that rainforest. And that's a really, really difficult balance to strike. And many governments and you know, many, many places are struggling with that question right now. Yeah, because we know that deforestation can threaten animal species. And this is something that we've had quite a few questions about. We've had a question from Daisy and also from Caitlin, who's six. And both of them wanted to know what the most endangered species in the rainforest is. Good question there. I think possibly the easiest answer is just to give you a few ideas of species. Although I guess the real answer here is that we simply don't know. There is so much rainforest and so little work has been done on it actually that we don't know how many species there are. People are discovering new species every year. But as we're discovering new species, there are also species that go extinct. So there may be some species that have already gone extinct that we just simply don't know about. But from the ones that we do know about, there are some which are really very endangered. So there's a place called the IUCN and they do basically they give what am I trying to say here? They give ratings to various animals. So there are some area animals which are called critically endangered and some which are just endangered. So the ones that are critically endangered are the ones that have got very few organisms left in the population and the ones where their populations have declined very rapidly over recent years. So these are the ones that are most at threat of going extinct in the wild. A couple that you might have heard of there's the golden lion tamarin. So that's a really beautiful sort of orangey looking monkey and it's got it's called golden lion. So it's golden fur and it's kind of all around its head like a mane like a lion. So those there are a few of those in the wild but there are quite a few in captivity. So people are doing lots of conservation efforts to try and reintroduce them to the wild. We've also got things there is an Amazon giant glass frog. So this is a frog that is almost see-through. So that's why it's called a glass frog. This is a giant one. The giant ones are about three inches long. So that really is a giant in terms of these teeny tiny glass frogs but there really aren't very many left of those and there are also quite a few parrot species. So I think it is the Imperial Amazon parrot. I think they're restricted to one of the islands in the Caribbean and I think there are only 50 of those left in the wild. So a particular species like that it's ones like those that we need to concentrate the biggest efforts on so that we can get the population numbers back up so they're more sustainable and so that they will survive in the wild. Right yeah thank you very much. I had never heard of glass frogs so I'm going to look them up straight after this. So we've got another question about threats to the rainforest. This one's from Carter. It's a pretty serious question. We hear a lot about the threats to the rainforest and Carter wants to know is it too late to save the rainforest? Have we has too much damage been done? Are we too late to save it? Yeah that's that's a really tricky but also really important question. Thank you Carter. No I don't think it is too late to save it but I think we also maybe need to think about what we mean by save. So you know if if by save we mean you know just kind of keep the rainforest as it is never let it be touched again never never let another tree be lost then no I mean I don't think that's really possible. You know as I said earlier people are always going to keep using rainforests and so it's not really our job to tell people especially in other countries that they can't use the rainforest that they've been surviving in for for many many years. So I think maybe rather than thinking in terms of saving rainforests from humans maybe a different way of thinking about it would be how rainforests and humans can be helped to coexist to kind of live together better so that both can stay healthy and thrive and I guess that means you know not just protecting certain parts of the rainforest and keeping it keeping them you know kind of shut away from humans no matter what but also kind of finding new techniques new ways to use the rainforest better but that won't completely destroy it. So I think you know the sort of well-being of rainforests and the well-being of people have to go hand in hand in that sense. Thanks Linane. And Benjamin has got a good question it's also about saving the rainforest and he would like to know are there any organisations whose purpose is to save the rainforest? He says save the Amazon rainforest but I wonder maybe there's some that save other rainforests too. Yeah that's a good question. There are quite a few different kinds of organisations that are working to save the Amazon rainforest but also rainforest in general. So there are quite a lot of large international organisations like Rainforest Alliance, the Forest Peoples Programme for example that aim to save rainforests pretty much everywhere and that have specific programmes in the Amazon rainforest so that's one kind of organisation. There's also quite a big organisation called Survival International that works to really protect the rights and the land of Indigenous people around the world so Indigenous people are people who have basically lived in that particular area on that land in those rainforests for many many years well before any other groups came into the area and so they have a very special kind of right to the land and so you know organisations like Survival work on the basis that if they help Indigenous people protect their lands and manage their lands they will also help to save the rainforest in that way. Now the question about Amazon rainforest is interesting I had to actually ask my colleague Dr Evan Killick about this because he actually works on Amazon rainforest so thank you Evan wherever you are. So he tells me that as in other parts of the world there's also some really really important work being done to save the rainforests on the ground in these countries which are really worth supporting so the examples he's given me from the Amazon are the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazonian Basin so these are sort of based in South America itself and he also tells me that there exists a number of actual Indigenous community run projects that try to save the environment while also fighting for Indigenous people's rights and these include the Kofan in Ecuador and the Achaninka in Brazil so you know in case you are interested I'm sure we could get hold of more links but you know do give it a quick Google because these are organisations that are worth supporting. Sure and actually that ties in really nicely with another question that we've gotten which is from Hisham and Hisham says what can we learn about protecting the rainforest from the people that live there? Great question Hisham. We can learn many many things about protecting the rainforest from the people who live there. I'll just try and pick up on two things which are connected I think the first thing is that this may sound a bit strange but very often people who live in the rainforest don't see that rainforest as this kind of special untouchable super sacred thing that they can't do anything with. It is basically very much woven into their everyday life so you will find people using wood from the forest to build their houses. You will find people cutting down trees to plant their crops and to touch on another question which I got earlier as well you do find people using animals from the jungle like elephants or dogs as part of their work. Elephants for example have been used for many many years in South Asia as beasts of burden so beasts that transport people or carry things carry very heavy stuff through the jungle. I think what we need to understand looking at how people who actually live in the rainforest relate to the rainforest is that the rainforest is very much part of everyday life. It's not necessarily a kind of fragile it is fragile but it's not necessarily something that we need to try and keep apart from humans. I think what's really important is that we understand how humans in rainforests live together and in that sense I guess the second thing that we can learn from these people who live in the rainforest is actually how to sort of view the rainforest not so much as just something that we can just use as humans and then forget about. We need to learn how to look at the rainforest as a sort of source of life as something that we need to live with and that we need to learn how to respect and that we need to take care of because it is something that all our lives depend on you know obviously if you live in the rainforest your life depends a lot more you know much more immediately on that rainforest being healthy and strong and everything but actually all of us do rely on the rainforest in some way and maybe sort of thinking more about how you can respect for how you can respect and care for it would be a good start. Thanks Liana and we've got a question that's just come in I think maybe this is maybe this one for Louise who could talk maybe about the animals that live there. So we've been asked what is a canopy so what in the rainforest is a canopy? Okay so there are various different layers of the canopy you've got the ground floor and the canopy is towards the top so this is the third one so this is where all most of the trees are so most of the leaves so you've got lots of birds living there you've got lots of monkeys living there you've got quite a few insects up there sometimes the butterflies will go up there as well so this is an area that is quite dense in terms of the leaves it can be very hot as well and it also gets quite a bit of light compared to the other areas like the the forest floor there is only one area above the canopy and that's the emergent layer where some of the really tall trees are poking out of the top and you will get some birds with big nests on the top of there sort of overlooking the whole of the rainforest. Okay so there's different layers in the rainforest and the canopy is one of those layers? Yes yes the third layer yeah. Okay and here's another question um what is the smallest animal in the rainforest? That is a question so there are so many invertebrates so these will be basically things like insects and creepy crawlies these will be the things which are the smallest things so there will be lots of organisms that you really can barely see because they are so small so those are going to be the tiniest ones maybe things like little ticks and tiny tiny insects that you might have. Some of those really small ones the frogs are extremely small the mouse lemur that's just been found again that's really not going to be very big at all and quite a few chameleons now are maybe just the size of your thumb the top bit of your thumb it would be able to sit there so there are some amazing animals that are extremely small but obviously we don't know that much about them because they are so small and we have to use special instruments to actually go out and find them. Thank you very much Louise. All right everyone we've come to the end of our time for answering everyone's questions thank you so much for tuning in and especially if you've sent a question and thank you very much to Liana and Louise for answering those questions and we're going to make and we're going to put some links up so if you'd like to watch again or you've got friends that would like to watch you'll be able to watch this program later and so we'll make sure that that gets to you and thank you very much everyone and we'll see you next time. Bye. Thank you. Bye.