Everglades National Park - Treetop Ponds

During times of flood, the animals instinctively head for higher ground -- the forested hammocks, which rise like dwarfed hills from the watery grasslands. Some hammocks are only knolls a few feet across, but others cover hundreds of acres, punctuating the landscape with thickets of such trees as the gumbo-limbo, nicknamed the "tourist tree" because its peeling shiny red bark resembles a sunburned bather. Majestic live oaks are heavily laden with glossy green leaves and with strands of Spanish moss, a flowering plant that takes its nourishment from the air instead of from the ground or the tree on which it hangs. Spanish moss has diminutive green flowers; other air plants explode with spectacular red blossoms like b right ribbons festooning the trees. The large ones with cup-shaped clusters of leaves create their own miniature world. The center of the leaf cluster fills with water, forming a treetop pond that attracts mosquitoes and other insects; warbles, tree-frogs, lizards, and other animals come to feed.

Such air plants are givers of life. In contrast, the strangler fig takes it away. This tree begins life as a seed that becomes lodged in a tree, perhaps transferred there unwittingly by a bird. As it grows, it sends a profusion of roots down to the ground and wraps itself around the host's trunk in a series of bearlike hugs. It competes with its host for sunlight, water, and nutrients, and ultimately suffocates it, too. By the time the victim decays, the strangler has replaced it as a full-sized tree, adding a contorted, twisted beauty to the wooded islands.

In the evening or early morning, when the hammocks are moist with dew and filled with rich smells from the fern-covered ground, tiny, colorful tree snails crawl ever so slowly on the bark of trees, decorating them like Christmas ornaments that have sprung to life. Some are orange, lavender, or vivid green; others are mottled, or banded in orange and white, or pale yellow and rose. The color combinations are infinitely varied, but even more amazing is the fact that each variation is unique to a particular hammock, as though the jewel-like snails were living on solitary islands in the sea. With their antennae stretched out, the snails slide along on a carpet of self-made mucus, scraping off plant growths and retiring into their shelly houses when the sun is overhead. As soon as the annual drought arrives, these moisture-loving mollusks attach their shells to branches with adhesive and wait for the rains to return.