Our visit to the Garden of Palms today was a short and fun presentation: a brief overview of the Amazon rainforest! The crowd today was a bit smaller than usual, but nevertheless was quite engaged and delighted by the brightly colored slides. We went through the layers of the rainforest, from the dizzying heights of the canopy layer to the dark, musty forest floor of the canopy and explored some of the fascinating wildlife and plants that populate this incredibly diverse habitat.
Residents were especially interested in some of the short videos and images we had included of animals, and they had a great deal of fun guessing the names of some rainforest animals on one of our slides. One of our members, Porter, introduced some of the unique fungi that live in the rainforest, including the parasitic Cordyceps fungus that specifically targets ants in a terrifying and gruesome method of mind control. The elders were very much intrigued by this tidbit of information and were all relieved to hear that such fungi did not have a human equivalent.
However, this also ended up sparking a conversation on the changing landscape of the world and climate change, as one of the residents, Mr. Miller, inquired about how the rainforest was changing with all the human activity happening nowadays. He made a speech about how his generation could now only watch at the devastation occurring around us because it was beyond their time, while it would fall upon our generation to finally try and remedy this pressing issue. Another resident, Paul, told us some stories of his time spend living in the Ecuadorian rainforest decades ago. As always, we enjoyed hearing the elders' unique perspectives on the world around us, and we hope to be back more to have more fulfilling conversations like this one!
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