Animal · Brazil, Peru, Colombia
Lowland tapir
Tapirus terrestris — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The lowland tapir is a heavy forest animal with a short, bendy trunk that it uses like a finger to pull leaves and fruit to its mouth. It weighs about as much as three grown-ups, yet it moves quietly through thick jungle. When something frightens it, it runs straight for the nearest river.
Picture credit: Richard Hatakeyama (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · NasserHalaweh (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the lowland tapir live?
Home: rainforest and river banks in South America.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina.
Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.
The short profile
Fully grown: up to 2.5 m long and about 1 m at the shoulder. It weighs about 225 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
Tapirs are old animals in more than one way: their family has changed little for millions of years, and their closest living relatives are horses and rhinoceroses, not pigs. A lowland tapir feeds mostly at night on leaves, buds, grass and a great deal of fruit. The seeds pass through it unharmed and land far from the parent tree, so biologists sometimes call the tapir the gardener of the forest. Water is its second home. It swims well, walks along the bottom of rivers and will sink out of sight when a jaguar is near. A calf is born after a pregnancy of about thirteen months, covered in white stripes and spots that break up its shape among the leaves. Those markings fade before the calf is a year old. Adults live alone, follow the same worn paths for years and leave piles of dung near the water as signposts.
Find it on the globe
Lowland tapir 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
Is a tapir a kind of pig?
No, it only looks a little like one. Tapirs belong with horses and rhinoceroses in a group of hoofed animals that carry their weight on an odd number of toes.
What does a tapir do under water?
It holds its breath and walks along the river bed, grazing on water plants. It can also hide with only the tip of its nose above the surface, using it like a snorkel until the danger has passed.
Why is the tapir in danger?
Forests are cleared for farms and roads, and tapirs are still hunted for meat. Because a female raises only one calf every two years or so, a population loses animals faster than it can replace them.
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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