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Amazon Rainforest Tours and Travel | Flooding in the Amazon Rainforest

The flooded habitats of the Amazon Rainforest are one of the fascinating phenomena that attract international visitors on Amazon tours. As the Amazon and its tributaries flow through areas of the rainforest that are mostly flat, the water moves slowly, giving the excess nowhere to go but over the riverbanks, creating a vital component of the rainforest's ecological balance. During the rainy season, water levels of the Amazon River can fluctuate thirty feet, producing thousands of miles of flooded forests. Animals migrate to these temporary habitats to feed and breed. This helps to enrich the mineral content of the waters, disperses seeds that colonize plant species and replenishes the adjacent areas with essential moisture and nutrients, to the benefit of fish, amphibian and other water species. Life becomes more difficult for predators during flooding periods since they must hunt over a larger area for their prey.

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Igapo forests, comprising 2% of the Amazon Rainforest, are perpetually flooded. Varzea forests (meaning flooded forest in Portuguese) cover some 60,000 square miles of the Amazon and flood periodically. Varzea forests have richer soil than the Igapo forests because they receive the nutrients contained in the sediments that flow in whiterivers. Trees grow taller and are more diverse here than in Igapo forests where soils are unstable due to the constant moisture and because they are free of sediment except for short periods as waters recede, carrying decaying matter from the surrounding forests.
Providing temporary habitats for shoreline birds, islands, beaches and sandbars are always being formed and washed away in the Amazon as a result of sediment carried by the tributaries from the Andes. These land formations become the soil for fast growing colonizing scrub vegetation that attract new species, sometimes nearby, sometimes from afar. Some are floating islands of meadow grasses that may exceed a square mile in size, providing valuable habitat for grass-eating species such as the capybara and the manatee.
Other islands are at least partially stable, making them popular destinations on Amazon tours. Twelve million-acre Marajo Island in the Brazil Amazon divides the river into two channels where it flows into the Atlantic. Meandering through the Peru Amazon, the Napo tributary alone contains some 130 islands. Brazil's Anavilhanas Archipelago, the world's largest fresh water archipelago, is comprised of some 400 islands in the Rio Negro.
The Amazon is also known for its oxbow lakes, bodies of standing water that form when the river recedes, attracting many species, that make them prime visitor attractions on Amazon tours. The Manu tributary in the Peru Amazon contains thirteen oxbow lakes.

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