Able to lift hundreds of times its own body mass, the rhinoceros beetle holds the greatest relative strength of any animal on the planet. The explanation lies in a chitin exoskeleton, in the physics of small scales and in millions of years of male rivalry inside the Amazon rainforest.
Unusually flexible wrists and long, sharp claws turn the front paws of the coati into hands that open fruit most other Amazon animals cannot break.
Far from the flesh stripping monster of the movies, the red piranha works as a scavenger and a recycler in the Amazon basin. Field biology describes a shy fish that schools for protection and keeps river ecosystems healthy.
The common opossum neutralizes rattlesnake venom with proteins in its own blood, hunts vipers and helps balance the Amazon. Its chemistry is a lead for antivenom research.
A PLOS ONE survey of amphibians and reptiles across the canga and forest of southeastern Para explains why the animals in an Amazonian backyard depend on the smallest details of the ground.
A study in Scientific Reports tracked the activity of Goeldi’s monkey, Callimico goeldii, and found that its internal clock shifts with daylight, atmospheric pressure and events inside its own social group.
Salt licks, known as colpas or barreiros, concentrate minerals into a few metres of Amazonian ground and pull in tapirs, monkeys and peccaries. A study explains why these animals eat soil.
Leafcutter ants never eat the leaves they cut. They use them to grow a Leucoagaricus fungus underground, in the oldest farming partnership on the planet.
Igapo, the Amazon forest flooded by dark acidic rivers, holds around two hundred fish species found nowhere else on Earth. Their survival depends directly on the trees left standing underwater.
Snakes without a drop of venom wear the red, black and yellow rings of true coral snakes and survive on the bluff. Scientists explain how evolution invented the same trick again and again.
