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.
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.
