Educational

Lobaria lichens play a crucial role in forest ecology. They are able to accomplish the rare feat of fixing atmospheric nitrogen—an essential nutrient for plant growth, though almost no organisms are able to extract it from the air. These lichens mine this precious nutrient from the atmosphere and when they fall to the forest floor and decay, that nitrogen is made available to the entire ecosystem.

The licorice fern is a dainty forest dweller primarily found growing on mossy rock faces and the trunks and mossy branches of old-growth trees, sometimes hundreds of feet above the ground in the forest canopy.

Slime molds are among the oddest creatures of the rainforest. These frequently brightly coloured organisms represent an interphase between the multicellular bodies of plants and animals and the unicellular world of amoebas and other protists.

Rather than make its food through photosynthesis, carnivorous sundews, like the ones seen here, supplement their diet by feeding on insects! The tiny tentacles have a sticky dew or “mucilage” on them…

  A rare and beautiful flower, the yellow tooth-leaved monkeyflower (Erythranthe dentata), in Canada, is restricted to a handful of valleys on southwestern Vancouver Island. This diminutive rainforest…

  Looking like an oversized clover, the redwood sorrel (oxalis oregana) is one of BC’s loveliest and rarest rainforest plants, found only in a few scattered sites on Vancouver Island and Haida…

For almost two hundred years, the Marbled Murrelet was one of North America’s most mysterious birds. Though western scientists first described this charming little seabird (likened to a “plump robin”)…