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music ambience: Cloudforest sound Well, there's a place in the tropics where having your head in the clouds is not considered such a bad thing. In fact, for the plants and animals who live there, it's essential. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Just like rainforests, cloudforests support incredibly diverse numbers of plants and animals, from howler monkeys to hummingbirds. But the big difference is that cloudforests are mostly sustained by the thick cloud and fog banks that roll in off the ocean every year. Dusty Becker is an assistant professor at Kansas State University. She conducts her research in a west Ecuadorian cloudforest. "The vegetation is bathed in the mist. And so instead of seeing giant trees like you might see in a rainforest, you see medium sized trees, but they're shaggy with mosses and epiphytes and plants that are adapted to trapping the fog. And so it's a really mystical place. Some people call them Elvin forests or cloud forests. And these are isolated pockets. You can think of them as islands of habitat, or cloud forest islands up on the tops of these hills." During a six-month-long fog season, about two and a half acres of cloud forest can trap a million gallons of water. And that enables the forest to sustain itself during times of drought. "Without the fog, the place would just be a desert. It would just dry up and as proof, you go into the lowlands where there is no fog and you have a desert. It takes going up to where the fog hits that you get this incredible lush-rainforest-like place." Please visit our website at pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet is presented by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner. music