40 Fun Facts About Temperate Rainforests

Which white-furred animal of Canada's coastal rainforest is the official mammal of British Columbia?

Kermode bear, or spirit bear, is a black bear whose white coat comes from a recessive gene, so dark parents can carry it unseen. By day the white ones catch more salmon than black ones do.

A small red stone in Olympic National Park's Hoh Rainforest marks one square inch set aside to protect what?

Silence is the goal: sound recordist Gordon Hempton placed the stone in 2005, and the spot has been called the quietest place in the United States.

Rare albino redwoods in California have ghost-white needles because they cannot produce which pigment?

Chlorophyll is what lets a plant feed itself, so an albino redwood lives only by taking sugar through its roots from a normal tree, usually its parent. About 400 are known.

Which legendary ape-like creature was supposedly filmed in California's Six Rivers National Forest in 1967?

Bigfoot is also called Sasquatch, a name about thirty years older. In 1958 a bulldozer operator had found 16-inch footprints in the same national forest.

Which film franchise shot a 1997 sequel in Fern Canyon, a fern-walled ravine among California's redwoods?

Jurassic Park's sequel The Lost World began filming in the canyon. The makers chose redwood country because research suggested dinosaurs lived in forests like it, not in the tropics.

The bark of the Pacific yew, a small understory tree of Northwest rainforests, first yielded a drug for which disease?

Cancer of the breast, ovary and lung is treated with paclitaxel, or Taxol, first isolated from the bark. The yew was growing scarce before chemists found a way to make the drug from cultivated trees.

Which country's Franz Josef and Fox glaciers end in valleys they share with temperate rainforest?

New Zealand's Franz Josef Glacier is so steep that it drops from snowfields above 2,500 metres to about 300 metres above the sea in just 11 km, ending among rainforest trees.

Which amphibians are so diverse in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that it is called their 'Capital of the World'?

Salamanders of about 30 species live in the Smokies, part of the rain-soaked southern Appalachians, where the wettest high forests count as temperate rainforest. The red-cheeked kind lives nowhere else.

Southern beech, a mainstay of Patagonian and Australasian rainforests, has left fossils on which other landmass?

Antarctica was once joined to Australia and other southern lands in the supercontinent Gondwana, which may be how the trees came to be scattered around the southern Pacific.

Which predators of British Columbia's coastal rainforest swim between islands and take most of their food from the sea?

Wolves on this coast swim as far as 12 km between islands and get 75 to 90 percent of their diet from the ocean, including seals, otters and the heads of salmon.

Which US president gives his name to the elk of Olympic National Park's rainforests, the largest-bodied elk subspecies?

Theodore Roosevelt had the elk named after him by a naturalist friend. Wanting to protect the herds was a main reason he declared Mount Olympus a national monument in 1909.

Which US state, nicknamed the Evergreen State, holds the Hoh Rainforest on its Olympic Peninsula?

Washington's Hoh valley receives an average of 140 inches of precipitation a year, which is close to 12 feet of water falling on its mossy forest.

Which US state holds the Tongass, the country's largest national forest and a vast stretch of temperate rainforest?

Alaska's Tongass covers 16.7 million acres of the state's southeastern panhandle, an expanse larger than ten whole US states.

Which tree, called the Tree of Life by many Northwest Coast First Nations, is the usual wood of totem poles?

Western red cedar logs were towed whole to the village before carving. The same tree gave coastal peoples canoes, house boards, watertight baskets and clothing.

Which organisms link tree roots into the underground networks studied by Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard?

Fungi wrap around roots and move nutrients between trees. Simard found that the biggest old 'mother trees' act as hubs of the network and help feed nearby seedlings.

Which nickname is given to the recurring atmospheric river that drenches the west coast of the United States and Canada?

Pineapple Express storms are narrow corridors of water vapour that reach from the waters near Hawaii to any point on the continent's western shore, bringing heavy rain.

Which Australian state holds the Tarkine, the country's largest remaining single tract of temperate rainforest?

Tasmania's Tarkine holds cool, wet forest of a kind inherited from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, alongside relics of the island's early mining days.

Which country's rainforest holds Gran Abuelo, an alerce tree that may be more than 5,000 years old?

Chile's Great-Grandfather tree showed about 2,400 rings in the part of the trunk a borer could reach, so its full age is a model's estimate that would rival the oldest bristlecone pines.

Which source of moisture, absorbed straight through the needles, helps California's redwoods through dry months?

Ocean fog can supply about 30% of the water a redwood uses in a year, dripping to the soil and seeping into the leaves. The tallest trees grow where it rolls in most often.

Which name is given to a fallen, decaying trunk on which rainforest seedlings take root, safe from soil diseases?

Nurse log is the term because the rotting wood feeds and waters young trees like a nursery: moss on the bark holds moisture, and the perch keeps seedlings away from pathogens in the soil.

Which term, from the Greek for 'upon plant', covers the mosses and ferns that live harmlessly on rainforest branches?

Epiphytes take their water and nutrients from rain, air and trapped debris, and use the tree only as a perch. That is what separates them from true parasitic plants.

Which effect leaves the town of Sequim, just north of the sodden Olympic Mountains, about as dry as Los Angeles?

Rain shadow forms because Pacific storms drop their moisture on the mountains' windward slopes, feeding the rainforests, and reach Sequim nearly wrung dry: under 16 inches falls there a year.

Which continent holds the largest area of temperate rainforest on Earth, along the mountains of its Pacific coast?

North America's belt of coastal rainforest runs from Kodiak Island south to the redwoods of northern California. The second largest lies on the far side of the equator, beside the Andes.

The best sites in Pacific temperate rainforests hold at least four times as much of what as any tropical forest?

Biomass, the sheer weight of living matter, piles up here because many of the world's largest and tallest tree species grow side by side in these forests.

Which nutrient, traced from salmon carcasses into spruce needles 500 metres from streams, feeds Pacific coastal forests?

Nitrogen from the ocean reaches the trees because predators leave up to half the salmon they catch on the forest floor, providing as much as 24% of the supply in streamside woods.

Which town, once capital of Russia's Pacific colony, gives its name to the world's largest species of spruce?

Sitka spruce can grow to just over 100 metres, among the tallest trees on Earth, even though its shallow roots spread through wet, poorly drained soil.

Delegates drafting the charter of which organisation held a memorial among the redwoods of Muir Woods in 1945?

United Nations delegates from 50 countries, meeting in nearby San Francisco, gathered in Cathedral Grove to honour the US president who had died days before he was due to open the conference.

Which large mammals of South Africa's Knysna forest, a temperate rainforest, had dwindled to a lone female by 2019?

Elephants once sheltered in the Knysna forest in herds thought to number about 1,000, and the survivors became the only unfenced ones left in the country.

Which tree dominates the 'Celtic rainforest' of western Britain and Ireland, including Dartmoor's mossy Wistman's Wood?

Oak woods like Wistman's, whose name is said to come from a Devon dialect word for eerie, are small fragments of the rainforest that once covered much of Ireland and the west coast of Great Britain.

Old man's beard, which hangs from rainforest branches and thrives only in clean air, is what kind of organism?

Lichen of this kind, also called beard moss, is so sensitive to dirty air that it serves as a living gauge of air quality. Birds gather it as nesting material.

Where in Canada did the 1993 'War in the Woods' at Clayoquot Sound see 856 people arrested over rainforest logging?

Vancouver Island's blockades against clearcutting were the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history until 2021, when another logging protest on the same coast overtook them.

Which Japanese island's ancient cedar forest inspired the setting of Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke?

Yakushima's best-known cedar, Jōmon Sugi, is reckoned to be at least 2,000 years old, and the island's forest has been a natural World Heritage Site since 1993.

Which slow-growing Australian rainforest conifer can live beyond 2,000 years and has golden wood whose oils resist rot?

Huon pine also clones itself: a stand on Mount Read, every tree a genetically identical male, is reckoned to have held the same spot for about 10,000 years.

Which outdoor brand's founder, Douglas Tompkins, bought vast tracts of Valdivian rainforest to create Pumalín Park?

The North Face began in San Francisco in 1964 on a $5,000 bank loan. Tompkins's park grew to 800,000 acres of rainforest, peaks and lakes running from the coast to the Andes.

Which sea's eastern shore is lined by Georgia's Colchic rainforests, the country's first natural World Heritage Site?

Black Sea shoreline some 80 km long holds the protected area, whose ancient rainforests and bogs range from the water's edge to more than 2,500 metres up.

Which Scandinavian country's coastal conifer belt contains small pockets that botanists class as temperate rainforest?

Norway's wettest coastal valleys see measurable rain or snow on at least 200 days a year, enough for patches of forest there to qualify as rainforest.

Which Pacific Northwest amphibian is so toxic that resistant garter snakes alone can eat one and survive?

Rough-skinned newt skin carries tetrodotoxin, the poison of pufferfish. The snakes and their prey are locked in an evolutionary arms race, and a snake can gauge whether one is too toxic to swallow.

Which tiny marsupial of the Valdivian rainforest is the last living member of an otherwise extinct ancient order?

Monito del monte is Spanish for 'little monkey of the bush', yet its closest relatives are the marsupials of Australia rather than the opossums that share its continent.

Which bird of old-growth riverside forests in Russia, China and Japan is the largest living species of owl?

Blakiston's fish owl needs huge old trees for its nest sites and stretches of river that never freeze, so that it can go on catching salmon and other fish through the coldest months.

Which forest cat of the Valdivian rainforest, also called the güiña, is the smallest wild cat in the Western Hemisphere?

Kodkod cats weigh only 2 to 2.5 kg, less than most house cats, and all-black ones with ghostly spots still showing through the dark coat are quite common.