55 Fun Facts About Amazon Rainforest

Which European country governs part of the Amazon rainforest?

France governs French Guiana as an overseas department, so a corner of Amazonia sits inside the European Union and uses the euro.

Despite its name, the Amazon's electric eel belongs to which group of fish?

Knifefishes include the electric eel, and its shocks so intrigued early scientists that they helped inspire Alessandro Volta's first battery in 1800.

Roughly how many individual trees are estimated to grow in the Amazon rainforest?

390 billion trees grow in Amazonia, a 2013 survey estimated, yet just 227 of its roughly 16,000 tree species make up half of them.

Which giant Amazon fish must come to the surface to breathe air?

Arapaima breathe air through a lung-like swim bladder, which lets these giants, up to 3 metres long, live in oxygen-poor backwaters.

After the Amazon, which region holds the world's second-largest tropical rainforest?

The Congo Basin's forest elephants eat and trample small trees, leaving room for fewer, bigger ones, which helps its rainforest store more carbon.

The Amazon River is said to be named after a battle in which local women did what?

Spanish explorers reported women who fought alongside the men, recalling the warrior Amazons of Greek myth, though some say the fighters were long-haired men.

Sent to find food in 1541, which Spaniard drifted down the Amazon?

Francisco de Orellana could not row back against the current to Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition, so his party drifted on and reached the river's mouth in August 1542.

Which US president nearly died exploring the Amazon's uncharted River of Doubt after leaving office?

Theodore Roosevelt took on the River of Doubt after losing the 1912 election, and an infected gash in his leg brought him close to death.

Which British explorer vanished in the 1920s searching the Amazon for a lost civilisation he called the City of Z?

Percy Fawcett vanished in 1925 with his son Jack, and Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have drawn on his Amazon exploits for The Lost World.

What gives terra preta, the dark fertile earth found across the Amazon, its black colour?

Terra preta owes its black colour to charcoal added by ancient people, along with pottery shards and organic waste; it is now accepted as a product of indigenous soil management.

Which Amazon predator lives in family groups and was heavily hunted for its velvety pelt?

Giant otter families are active by day and show little fear of people, which made them easy targets for pelt hunters and left the species endangered.

Why do Amazon leafcutter ants carry leaves to their nests?

To grow fungus: the ants feed the cut leaves to a fungus garden, and the fungus, not the leaves, feeds the colony's larvae.

What is the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

Cattle ranching drives most clearing, and soy is often planted later on the old pastures, which can push ranchers deeper into the forest.

Why did Brazil build the Trans-Amazonian Highway in the early 1970s?

To settle poor farmers: the military government gave settler families plots along the road, and their clearings pushed deforestation inland.

Which Amazon state was Brazil's top grain producer in the late 2010s?

Mato Grosso's farms grew more grain than any other state's, and critics say that expanding agriculture keeps encroaching on the rainforest.

What did the 2006 Soy Moratorium ban?

Under the 2006 Soy Moratorium, commodity traders agreed to stop buying soy from newly deforested land, a pledge prompted by a Greenpeace campaign.

Brazilian Amazon deforestation fell by roughly half in 2023, the first year of which president's term?

Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, and Amazon deforestation in Brazil fell by roughly half that year, a drop largely credited to his environmental policies.

Smoke from the 2019 Amazon fires darkened the daytime sky over which city thousands of km away?

São Paulo's sky went dark in the afternoon, and the scare turned the distant Amazon fires, little reported until then, into world news.

What did President Bolsonaro do after INPE reported deforestation up 88% in June 2019?

Fired the agency's director: Bolsonaro dismissed physicist Ricardo Galvão in August 2019 after calling INPE's deforestation figures lies.

By 2020, which country had provided most of the money in Brazil's Amazon Fund, set up in 2008?

Norway gave about 90 percent of the Amazon Fund's money by 2020, paid out only after Brazil proved its deforestation was falling.

Chico Mendes, the Amazon activist murdered in 1988, worked in what trade?

Chico Mendes was a rubber tapper who led his fellow tappers' union in defending the forest their trade depended on.

In which Brazilian state was Chico Mendes born and killed?

Acre is where Chico Mendes was born and died: after warning for weeks that he would be killed, he was shot at his Xapuri home in December 1988.

What was the 'empate' tactic used by Chico Mendes and his followers?

An empate was a human blockade to stop forest clearing: whole families of rubber tappers stood in front of the chainsaw crews.

Whose wartime conquests set off a brief second Amazon rubber boom?

Japan overran Asia's rubber plantations in early 1942, and the Allies' need for military rubber briefly put wild Amazon rubber back in demand.

Who smuggled some 70,000 rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in 1876?

Henry Wickham's seeds mostly died at Kew, yet the few thousand that sprouted grew into British colonial plantations that ended Brazil's rubber monopoly.

Which Irish diplomat documented the enslavement and torture of indigenous people in Peru's Putumayo rubber region?

Roger Casement, a British consul who had already exposed atrocities in the Congo, reported the Putumayo rubber camps' abuses to the Foreign Office.

Which animal, the world's largest rodent, grazes along Amazon rivers and wetlands?

The capybara, the world's largest rodent, is a semi-aquatic grazer that lives in groups along rivers and wetlands across the Amazon basin, escaping jaguars by diving.

Workers at Ford's Amazon town Fordlândia rioted in 1930 over what?

Cafeteria meals set it off: workers fed up with Ford's imposed diet rioted when managers switched to self-service lines, wrecking the town and sending the managers fleeing.

What is the fungal disease, endemic to the Amazon, that makes rubber plantations there so hard to run?

South American leaf blight epidemics wrecked Amazon rubber plantations in the early 20th century, most famously Henry Ford's Fordlândia.

The Yanomami live in the forest on the border between Brazil and which country?

Venezuela and Brazil share the Yanomami's forest, and in 1992, after a gold rush overran it, Brazil made its side a reserve twice the size of Switzerland.

What are the small independent gold-diggers who invaded Yanomami land called?

Garimpeiros poured into Yanomami land in a gold rush after 1987, and the tens of thousands of miners set off malaria epidemics among the Yanomami.

Which Brazilian agency switched in the late 1980s to a policy of avoiding contact with isolated tribes?

FUNAI stopped seeking out isolated tribes after veteran contact agent Sydney Possuelo pushed for the change, because contact had so often devastated them.

Which Amazon bird's chicks hatch with claws on their wings?

Hoatzin chicks escape predators by dropping into the water below the nest, then use their wing claws to clamber back up to safety.

Why are poison dart frogs so named?

Indigenous people tipped blowdarts with their toxin, though only a few Phyllobates species from western Colombia were ever used this way.

Which rodent gnaws open the hard capsule of the Brazil nut, spreading its seeds?

The agouti buries spare Brazil nuts in hidden caches for later, and the ones it never digs back up can sprout into new trees.

Brazil nuts are notable for an unusually high content of which micronutrient?

Selenium is so plentiful in Brazil nuts that, depending on where the tree grew, a single nut can meet a day's recommended intake.

Nearly all Brazil nuts come from forest trees, whose flowers need which pollinators?

Large wild bees are the only insects strong enough to pry open the tree's hooded flowers, one reason the nuts are gathered in the forest rather than farmed.

The harpy eagle, the Amazon's largest bird of prey, is the national bird of which country?

Panama chose the harpy eagle as its national bird, a hunter that specialises in plucking sloths from the rainforest canopy.

The giant Amazon water lily's ribbed leaves inspired which building's design?

The Crystal Palace copied the leaf's ribs: designer Joseph Paxton had shown their strength by standing his daughter on a floating leaf.

Victoria amazonica's flowers change from white to reddish pink after being pollinated by what?

A scarab beetle gets trapped overnight inside the closing white flower, then leaves dusted with pollen to carry to the next bloom.

Açaí berries grow on what kind of plant?

A palm: pickers climb its thin trunk by hand, with a loop of rope around their feet, to cut down each bunch of berries.

Amazon legend says the pink river dolphin can turn into a handsome man; what is this shapeshifter called?

Encantado tales say the dolphin comes ashore at night to seduce women, and a pregnancy with no known father could be blamed on it.

The Amazon river dolphin is unusual among dolphins because its neck vertebrae are what?

The boto's neck vertebrae are unfused, unlike those of most dolphins, so it can turn its head to steer through flooded forest.

The huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam stands on which Amazon tributary?

The Xingu's Big Bend, a stretch of about 100 km, lost much of its flow when the river was diverted to Belo Monte's main powerhouse.

What is the Amazon's 'Meeting of Waters' near Manaus?

Two rivers flowing side by side unmixed: the dark Rio Negro and the sandy Solimões differ in temperature and density, so they run for kilometres before blending.

Where does a large share of the Amazon rainforest's rainfall come from?

Water given off by the trees falls again as rain downwind, so the forest makes a large share of its own rainfall, which is why clearing it can dry the region.

What is the Amazon's seasonally flooded forest along whitewater rivers called?

Várzea forests are flooded by sediment-laden whitewater rivers, which leave them more fertile than the igapó forests along nutrient-poor blackwater rivers.

Which Amazonian people of Ecuador and Peru shrank the heads of enemies killed in battle?

The Shuar shrank enemy heads into tsantsas to trap the dead warrior's avenging soul and protect the victor from its revenge.

Cândido Rondon told his men contacting Amazon tribes to 'die if need be' but never what?

Never kill: Rondon made the phrase the motto of Brazil's Indian protection service, whose agents were told to hold fire even when met with arrows.

Manaus was given what special status in 1967 to attract industry to the interior?

A free trade zone's tax breaks were meant to draw people and industry to an Amazon region the military government saw as empty and exposed.

Which Amazon gold rush did Sebastião Salgado photograph in 1986?

Serra Pelada was dug by hand: Salgado's pictures show crowds of mud-caked men carrying sacks of earth up wooden ladders out of the pit.

Why does the Amazon add almost no net oxygen to Earth's air?

Its living things use it up: the trees' own respiration, plus microbes feeding on fallen leaves and wood, consume about as much oxygen as the forest releases.

In 2010 the Amazon suffered its second 'once-in-a-century' what in five years?

Drought: the 2010 dry spell spread wider than 2005's, and air samples showed the Amazon basin gave off more carbon than it absorbed that year.

In 2007, Ecuador offered to leave oil untapped under which Amazon national park in exchange for international payments?

Yasuní's plan ended early for lack of international money, and oil was later pumped from the park's fields anyway.

Deforestation in Colombia's Amazon surged after which rebel group's 2016 peace deal?

FARC guerrillas had kept vast forest areas closed, and once they laid down their arms, clearing for pasture spread into the land they left.