Biologist Phylis Coley and her husband, Tom Kursar, have devoted their working lives to the study of plants, and nowhere is it more fascinating, they say, than in Ecuador's Yasuni National Park - the most biodiverse place on the planet.
"Evolution is going incredibly fast here with the plants evolving as quickly as they can and the herbivores counter-evolving. It's a never-ending escalation," Coley told Al Jazeera. "They call it an 'arms race.' On one side the plants; on the other, insects and other herbivores. Each of them evolving defences to outwit the other."
In Yasuni, a single hectare of rainforest is home to more than 100,000 species of insect. In this tropical climate without a winter to knock back the insect population, "The diversity of insects is extremely high, and so this 'arms race' is running at a much faster rate. It's much more intense than anywhere else... Read More
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