Food Chain & Food Web
Some factors that might limit population growth include deforestation, low food supply, lack of space, and temperature. Deforestation is already a problem in the rainforest. The environment is getting smaller and smaller, so the animals are getting closer and closer together creating a lack of space. If the temperature dropped, some of the plants and animals would not be able to survive. If something happened to the food supply, some animals would die.
The sun creates all of the energy on the earth. The sun gives energy for all of the plants to grow. The sun gives each flower energy to survive. Then, the butterfly comes along and uses the energy from the flower to keep it living. For the toucan to survive it needs energy, so it eats the butterfly. This process keeps continuing.
If you would take one animal out of the food web, it would drastically affect all of the other animals. In a food web animals rely on each other to survive. For example, if all of the ants in the rainforest died then everything that eats the ant would be hungry. The toucan would probably die and then the boa, the animal that eats the toucan, would probably also die because it wouldn’t have any toucans to eat. The same thing goes for the monkey and the jaguar. The population number would definitely decrease if any of the animals would die.
The tropical ash tree is an invasive species to the rainforest. The ash tree has a very dense canopy. This dense canopy creates less light on the forest floor which slows down the growth of the native species. For example the native Hawaiian trees are dying out which is changing the rainforest. The tropical ash was introduced in the 1930's as a timber species to be used for wood products. It quickly spread and killed off many native trees. The Ohia tree is a lot smaller than the ash tree. The ash tree blocked all of the sunlight that the Ohia tree would have been able to get.