Animal · Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia
Capybara
Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The capybara is the biggest rodent in the world, a calm grass-eater from South America that can weigh as much as a grown person. It spends its days beside water and can stay under the surface for up to five minutes when it wants to disappear.
Picture credit: Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Enrique González (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Clodomiro Esteves Junior (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the capybara live?
Home: Grasslands, marshes and riverbanks across South America.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 106–134 cm long. It weighs about 50 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
Capybaras live in family groups of ten to twenty animals, and where the grazing is good after the rains, several groups may join into a herd of a hundred. Eyes, ears and nostrils all sit high on the head, so the animal can float with almost its whole body hidden and still see, hear and breathe. Its front teeth and cheek teeth never stop growing, which is lucky, because tough grass grinds them down all day long. Grass is hard to digest, so a capybara eats its own droppings in the morning and sends yesterday's meal through its gut a second time to get the rest out of it. Other animals treat a resting capybara as furniture: birds perch on its back and pick off ticks, and young ones simply climb on top of a parent. There are millions of them, and the IUCN lists the capybara as least concern, though in some regions numbers fall where the wetlands are drained.
Find it on the globe
Capybara is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How big does a capybara get?
Up to 134 centimetres long and about 60 centimetres at the shoulder, so roughly the size of a big dog. Adults usually weigh 35 to 66 kilograms, more than any other rodent.
Where do capybaras live?
In almost every country of South America except Chile, always close to water: rivers, lakes, ponds and flooded grasslands like the Pantanal and the Llanos.
Why does a capybara eat its own droppings?
Grass is hard work for a stomach. By sending it through a second time in the morning, the capybara gets the goodness the helpful gut bacteria unlocked on the first pass.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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