Project

Invertebrates of Costa Rica

"This is the forest primeval, the Emerald mansion that enchants and frightens us. Green and glistening as wet leaf largely unexplored yet vanishing before our eyes like mist off the trees after a tropical rain storm. 45 million years ago the world was a paradise of tropical rainforest almost pole to pole. We found fossil pollen from rainforest species and such wildly separated and unlikely places such as London, Alaska and Tennessee. With the coming of the first Ice Age the Rain Forest retreated to the latitudes near the equator. In the last 2 million years the green belt around the earth's middle has alternately shrunk and expanded as the ice ages have come and gone. For millennia now the Rain Forests have stretched almost unbroken across the land surfaces on either side of the equator extending North to the tropic of Cancer and South to the Tropic of Capricorn. Today however satellite photographs show the belt in tatters. It's heartland burnt, cut into blocks and patches. This time the villain in Eden isn't the snake human pressures are putting tropical paradise in jeopardy. Acre for Acre this moist mysterious ecosystem has more variety than a hundred supermarket shelves."

"Invertebrate, any animal lacking a vertebral column, or backbone. Invertebrates constitute the majority of the animal kingdom."

To find out more about the invertebrates of Costa Rica please link to these web sites: