Wildlife

The smallest bird in the Americas slips into torpor at dusk, dropping its temperature and heartbeat to save up to ninety-five percent of its daily energy.

The agouti buries Brazil nuts to eat later and forgets where it hid them. That forgetting germinates and regenerates the tallest trees in the Amazon rainforest.

The Amazonian manatee is the only manatee that lives solely in fresh water, eating up to 10 percent of its body weight in plants each day and regulating the aquatic vegetation of the basin.

South America’s largest canid eats more fruit than meat, becoming the most efficient seed sower of Brazil’s open savannas.

The sloth carries the slowest metabolism of any mammal in the Americas, taking a month to digest a single meal and tuning every gesture to that extreme economy.

The black caiman rules the Amazon’s rivers as the largest freshwater predator in the Americas, pairing an extreme bite with razor-sharp senses that hold the wetlands in balance.

The largest armadillo on Earth opens tunnels more than forty centimetres wide in Amazonian soil, leaving behind shelters that dozens of mammals, birds and reptiles reuse to escape the heat and hide from predators.

Brazil’s only venomous snake that announces itself: how the keratin rattle works, why the vibration outruns the human eye and what that dry sound is actually asking for.

The ocelot, Leopardus pardalis, is the most widely distributed medium sized cat in Brazil, and it organizes its territory with urine, feces and pedal gland secretions, an invisible border system that keeps rivals apart without a fight.

The hoatzin is the only bird in Brazil whose chicks hatch with functional wing claws, a temporary tool that lets them dive away from predators and climb back up to the nest.