ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the characteristics, values, problems, status, and potentials of the animal wildlife of the Venezuelan rain forest. The long history of environmental stability, the abundance and variety of plants and animal life, the remarkable adaptations shown by many species of animals, and dynamic organism-to-organism interactions make the neotropical rain forest of major importance to biologists and to our understanding of nature in general. Tropical rain forests are genetic reservoirs of plants and animals of great scientific or economic value. The destruction of habitat that is going on in many of the tropical rain forests and cloud forests in Latin America is endangering beautiful species of birds like the trogons, including the national bird of Guatemala, the quetzal. The Smithsonian Institution has a research program on wildlife ecology in Venezuela designed to compare the ecology of the animals of tropical rain forest in the Guatopo National Park with that of animals of the savannah ecosystem in the llanos.
