ise in the rate of which species are disappearing. In, Editors of Life, The Earth and the Universe, it was pointed out that “no habitat on earth harbors so many arboreal creatures as the rain forest...” (Barnet 252). Obviously, deforestation is a severe threat to animals. To compensate this tragedy, millions of dollars are spent conserving the works of our own species in museums, but not into conserving nature’s own works of art. There are currently two hundred and twenty-seven species of primates today, ninety percent of which live in tropical rain forests. Of these two hundred and twenty-seven species, half are considered endangered or rare. Unfortunately, once a species is extinct it will never return. The numbers of all these members of the community are in delicate balance and tied to each other by invisible threads of food, living conditions, and mutual cooperation. In the words of Peter Farb, “So intricate is the tapestry of the forest life that should a single vital thread somehow be broken, the entire pattern might unravel and ultimately the forest itself be destroyed” (10). This multitude of life does not merely live in the forest-it is the forest as much as the trees themselves. If these trends continue we will lose thousands of species before the turn of the century. Although people are beginning to realize that nature is not an opponent we must conquer, the seriousness of their action is very vague. It is difficult to estimate extinction rates when scientists have not yet described ninety percent of some groups in the tropics, but the crisis is comparable to extinction of dinosaurs.There are approximately ten million species of insects in the world. Very few of these species have ever been seen by man, let alone studied by him. “It is the insect world that demonstrates the depths of our ignorance” (Mitchell 133). In the tropical rain forests, the number of discoverie...
