Fascination Amazon River Its People, Its Animals, Its Plants

About this book

In this volume, the Amazon and its adjacent rainforest are presented in all their important facets: First, there is the vast river system itself, with its network of white, black, and clear water rivers. The different water qualities have an enormous impact on people, animals and plants. On the other hand, the people who live along this "Rio Mar," the ocean river, are described. They are the Caboclos, the descendants of the European immigrants and the indigenous people, and it is the different indigenous peoples who have mostly settled along the riverbanks since the rivers here replace the roads and make contact with other people possible in the first place. Although these ethnic groups have been in contact with Western civilization for generations, they have surprisingly preserved a number of remarkable traditions that are described here. The treasure of the Amazon is its plants and animals. Therefore, the most fascinating flowering plants, including numerous medicinal plants, tropical fruits, trees, epiphytes and lianas from different habitats are described in detail and illustrated with excellent photographs. Finally, it is the animals, especially in and around the river, that have always fascinated the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in 1801. Not only is the lifestyle of the legendary pink dolphins, piranhas and tarantulas explained here, but the impressive amphibians, reptiles and mammals of the jungle are also discussed.

This book is a translation of the original German first edition Faszination Amazonas by Lothar Staeck, published by Springer in 2019. In the first step, the translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. In the second step, a human revision was done by the author.

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Biography

Lothar Staeck is a professor of didactics of biology at the TU Berlin. His main focus is the education of students with a focus on "biology teachers of grades 5 - 13". He has been a specialist biology teacher on cruise ships for over 20 years and is an expert on the Amazon region in particular.