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Ambience: Peruvian rainforest

Mother nature has more than a few tricks up her sleeve and if you didn’t know any better, you might think there was black magic afoot in the Peruvian rainforest. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

”Someone who walks into one will immediately notice the difference between a devil’s garden and the rainforest around the devil’s garden.”

Megan Frederickson is a doctoral student in biological sciences at Stanford University. She studies the mysterious areas of the rainforest known as “devil’s gardens.”

“As someone walks in the rainforest, the rainforest around them is a dense tangle of trees and vines and flowers, and as you walk out into a devil’s garden, you can suddenly see the sky. And the trees are only short, maybe just a couple of meters tall, and the forest floor is bare. And there’s nothing but just one kind of tree with very slim trunks. So, it’s actually a spot in the Peruvian rainforest that you can often see the sky. Devil’s gardens are the subject of a local legend in the Amazon, that the devil’s gardens are the home of an evil forest spirit. And, as a result, people often try to avoid devil’s gardens.”

Well, scientists aren’t buying that it’s the devil that causes this phenomenon. But if it’s not an evil forest spirit, then what’s killing the other plants?

“And the first idea was that the tree that lives in devil’s gardens is a tree that secretes some kind of toxic chemical substance from its roots into the soil and, in so doing, makes it impossible for any other kinds of plants to grow nearby. And the second hypothesis is that the ants that live in the hollow, swollen stems of the tree species that lives in devil’s gardens might be responsible for weeding out other plants.”

Are ants responsible for the devil’s gardens? We’ll hear more in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation.