The problem with being a bromeliad is that you are stuck at ground level, and other plants can grow tall and shade you. However, there's also lots of advantages. They share with orchids and cacti a special metabolism based on crassulacean acid, which means that they can "breathe" at night, drastically reducing water loss. Many also form a water tank by joining their leaves together, sometimes with over a litre of water. This means that they can evolve into epiphytes, which cling to high tree branches getting all their nutrients from the air and detritus on the branch around them, but close to the sun (thus redefining "ground"). Or lipophytes, which sit on bare rock free from competitors for sunlight, such as those found growing in cracks in the otherwise smooth rocky hills of Vitoria and Corcovado in Rio.
It has been estimated that up to 50,000 litres per hectare can be held in bromeliad tanks, and although the normal quantity is much, much, smaller, it is a permanent enough habitat to form an attractive option for small creatures in need of a home. Dragonfly larvae can be fund there, and even the tadpoles of many frogs such as the Brazilian Hylid frog found in Espirito Santo. There are spiders that live exclusively in the MA bromeliads, and at least 43 species of ants (there really are an awful lots of ants in Brazil).
More importantly, from a human perspective, they are a significant habitat for the Aedes mosquito, carrier of Dengue fever. Not only do larvae wiggle in the forest bromeliads of the Mata Atlantica, dreaming of the cities they will invade when they are grown up, but Aedes have been found in the large bromeliads found on the rocky mountain outcrops of Vitoria. Especially the Alcantarea genus which forms 90% of the bromeliad flora there. Aedes seem not to like bromeliads very much, and prefer to lay their eggs in shaded artifiical containers, but they are there.
Lastly, if you really want to see a bromeliad up close, buy a pineapple. Cut off the top and replant it, with luck it should grow. My grandmother did this on her kitchen window, and it is still common practice in small farms and households here.
