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Plants grow in many different habitats. Ideal conditions for most are probably to be found in the tropical rainforest. There, warm temperatures and abundant rainfall promote rapid growth. Moving away from this ideal, plants adapted to a wide range of more challenging habitats. When rainfall is less, plants have evolved adaptations to locate, store, and conserve the limited and unreliable supplies of water, culminating highly specialized desert plants. Where temperatures are lower, different adaptations have come into play with equally specialized results in the high mountains and Arctic tundra. Some plants have adapted to living with fires, to toxic soils, and to an excess of water. Some insectivorous plants have even turned the tables on smaller animals by trapping and digesting them. Plants have evolved means of preventing or reducing browsing damage from animals, and some exact a service for the food they provide. The most notable benefit provided by animals are pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit and seeds. Some plants make use of other plants. Vines climb trees to get to good light, and for the same reason epiphytes grow in tree crowns. Parasitic plants behave like animals and obtain some or all of their nutrients from their cousins. Animals can move to where conditions are most suitable, and in case of migratory birds this can involve journeys of thousands of miles. Seeds germinate where they land, if conditions are not entirely suitable, they struggle, and if conditions are totally unsuitable, they die. So plants produce large numbers of seeds and spores, to ensure that at least a small proportion will land in a place where they can grow and reproduce. As animals ourselves, it is easy to identify with other animals. But plants, too, have many remarkable and fascinating aspects that need to be explored.

The forests of the world, especially in the tropics, are probably the most complex of all the communities of plants and animals. In tropical forests the trees often support cable like vines on their trunks, gardens of orchids and other epiphytes on their branches, and may also have parasitic plants plugged into the living tissue of their trunks or roots. Epiphytes, such as the Birds Nest Bromeliad (Bromeliad Nidularium regeliodes)get the full light they need by germinating on the branches, or sometimes the trunks of trees. The species presents the pollination syndrome of chiropterophily, and it is visited by the small bats and birds. Most plants

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