The jaguar is the only big cat in the Americas that submerges to hunt: it ambushes caimans and freshwater turtles inside the river, with a bite built to crack bony armour.
The largest freshwater dolphin on Earth lives in rivers where almost nothing is visible, using a biological sonar that turns every echo into a map of the water.
The mussurana hunts and swallows jararacas and rattlesnakes, protected by a natural immunity to bothropic venom and by relentless muscular constriction. Its work in the Brazilian countryside made it a historical ally of farmers.
The harpy eagle, Harpia harpyja, lifts sloths and monkeys that outweigh it and carries them dozens of metres up to nesting platforms built in the emergent trees of the Amazon rainforest. Muscle power, broad wings and talons that lock like clamps explain a feat that ultimately depends on the forest staying whole.
The pygmy marmoset weighs less than a chicken egg and lives clinging to Amazon tree trunks. Its claws, bark piercing incisors and cooperative family explain how the smallest primate on Earth survives.
The toco toucan controls its body temperature by opening and closing blood vessels in its huge bill, shedding up to sixty percent of resting heat without losing water.
High in the Amazon canopy lives a snake that glides between treetops with an efficiency that stuns aerospace engineers. It does not fall: it navigates the air.
An animal that has swum the oceans since the age of the dinosaurs chose the remote beaches of Amapá to breed, and this season delivered one of the highest nest counts recorded there in decades.
The last wild Spix’s macaw vanished in 2000. Today, captive-bred birds are relearning how to survive in the wild in Curaçá, in Brazil’s Bahia state.
A single school of filter-feeding fish processes truckloads of organic debris each low-water season. Meet the pacu-bosta, the invisible worker keeping Amazon rivers alive.
