Here in a Washington Post article, Darryl Fears writes of this perspective of death in the rainforest.

In Panama’s forest, death is a beautiful thing.

It kills ultimately for a good reason, so that trees in a wetter part of the forest can grow big and strong. according to a new study published in the Journal of Ecology.

“That’s exactly right,” said Erin R. Spear, lead author of the research and a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah. “We have this negative perspective on pathogens and disease. We think of pathogens as being destroyers, and in this case they are constructors.”

The killing part, Spear admits, is still ugly. Death sends a gang of pathogens in a wetter part of the forest to dispatch seeds that wind up there from a drier part of the forest. They meet their end in a slow, agonizing demise that looks perfectly awful on time lapse video.

But the cold truth is that seeds from the drier side carried about 40 miles by wind and birds had no business being in a place where they can hardly survive. Seedlings native to the wetter side have developed better defenses against attacking viruses, bacteria, disease and fungus that thrive there, but for drier seedlings it might as well be the set of a horror film.  See the rest of the article here