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.
The blotch pattern on a Boa constrictor never changes, letting researchers identify each snake in the Amazon with the precision of a human fingerprint and without ever touching it.
The hyacinth macaw pairs for life, and when it loses its partner it may refuse food and waste away alone. A bond that also helps hold the forest together.
The Amazon’s electric eel does more than deliver eight hundred and sixty volts: it uses weak pulses to converse, court and mark territory where eyesight is useless.
Silver scaled and red finned, the piraputanga anchors observation tourism in the transparent rivers of the Pantanal and works as a live gauge of the biome’s health.
A single tapir can carry more than ten thousand seeds through the forest in one day of walking. It is the only Amazon animal able to swallow the biggest seeds of all and return them to the ground ready to sprout.
South America’s giant stork is gaining ground again across the Pantanal floodplain and pockets of the Cerrado, and its active nests signal wetlands moving back toward health.
