How dangerous is the Amazon Rainforest?

The Amazon rainforest covers over 6 million square kilometers and spans across 8 countries. It is home to an estimated 10% of all species of living things on Earth and home to more than 2 million indigenous people. There’s a wider range of plants and animals here than anywhere else on Earth, but this also means more natural dangers. The Amazon is one of the most hostile natural environments on the planet and even the people who live here are in constant danger. But how dangerous is the Amazon rainforest and what do you have to watch out for?

(The only people who can survive here are the ones who have always lived here, with around 400 Indigenous groups speaking over 300 languages)

There are plenty of things that can kill you in this enormous jungle and in 2022 the Brazilian Forum of Public Security claimed there were over 8,000 deaths within the Brazilian Amazon region of the jungle.

The main dangers of traveling through the Amazon

Criminal groups

Most of those 8,000 deaths within the jungle region of Brazil were down to the various criminal factions operating in the area. At any given time there are multiple major gang wars between the warring factions of the country, and they often use the rainforest to hide, grow narcotics, and “get rid” of people. The other countries that surround the Amazon are no better, with some having higher murder rates than Brazil, making it one of the riskiest places to walk through even without the trees.

Poisonous plants

There is an unknown number of poisonous plants in the Amazon because much of it is still unexplored, but the variation is known to be in the hundreds. The Amazon is also home to several poisonous plants that are native and can’t be found anywhere else in the world, such as the Strychnos and Curare plants which are both used to make a very strong poison the locals use on arrowheads and blowpipe darts to kill things.

(If you see a frog brightly colored like this in the Amazon, or anywhere else for that matter, then just don’t lick it and you should be fine)

Poisonous animals

There are over 300 species of snakes confirmed to live in the Amazon, and many of them have poison capable of killing a human. There are 10 types of coral snakes and 7 species of pit vipers, which are normally not an aggressive snake but will strike in defense, or when an unsuspecting person comes close to stepping on one. There are over 100 types of poisonous frogs and even butterflies that carry deadly toxins. Everything from caterpillars to ants and bees are present throughout the endless expanse of trees, and that’s before we even get started on the spiders. Not only is the world’s most venomous spider found here, but also the world’s biggest, and both could be on the other side of every tree trunk or leaf, making it the last place on earth to go for people with arachnophobia.

Travel speed

The average travel distance for someone walking on flat open ground will be around 20 miles each day, but this drops to a single mile in the Amazon. One of the biggest causes of death for people who get trapped here is they can’t make it through the trees fast enough and end up running out of supplies or dying of infection. There is a story about a woman named Shannon Fraser who became lost in a rainforest in Australia with no equipment and only basic thin clothing. Within two days of being lost, the plants scratched and tore away at her clothing until she was left completely naked, and the rainforest she was stuck in wasn’t close to being as thick as the Amazon.

(The trees make it almost impossible to cover a large amount of ground, with the rivers being the only way to travel any real distance)

Insects

Mosquitoes in countless numbers constantly buzzing around is one of the most annoying things that can happen in the jungle, and mosquitoes aren’t even close to being the most dangerous things out there. There are giant centipedes that can grow up to 30 cm long and possess powerful venom, swarms of bullet ants that are almost impossible to see until you step on a colony, and a whole range of very strange-looking caterpillars that contain all kinds of nasty poisons. Even without all the venomous creatures that lurk within the trees, there are enough flying insects that bite in the Amazon to drive anyone crazy.

The jungle is home to one especially interesting poisonous insect called the assassin bug. These pointy-nosed members of the shield bug family like to feed on bees and ants, both of which they have developed special tricks to catch. When it’s after bees, the assassin bug will coat its legs in sticky tree sap and hang off the edge of something near a hive, grabbing the bees out of mid-air. In order to get close enough to the ants and stop them all from attacking the assassin bug, it coats its body in dozens of dead ants to mask its pheromones, allowing it to simply be ignored by them.

The river systems

If you ever go deep into the Amazon, the only way to make any real progress through the trees is to travel by river. It’s fine if you’re in a decent-sized boat, but if you have to walk through the trees and come to a river, your life could end horribly by crossing it. There are 3 main dangers within the water system of the Amazon, which are electric eels, caiman, and piranas. Electric eels aren’t very common and only hurt people who are unlucky enough to accidentally come close and Piranhas don’t normally attack people unless provoked, the water levels are especially low, or natural food sources are scarce. There are different sources on pirana deaths, with one stating there hasn’t been a single official death caused solely by piranhas, but another claims that 4 people died in 3 separate attacks in Paraguay in 2022.

(This is a young Caiman, just waiting to grow up to 12 feet long and eat anything unlucky enough to not see it)

Caiman are the real dangers in the river systems and live throughout most of the jungle. They are the biggest species of Alligator and can grow up to 4 meters long, making them extremely dangerous. They hunt by sneaking up on their prey and rapidly striking from underwater. They can swim up to 20 mph and can reach speeds of up to 30 mph on land, though they get tired from running very quickly and can’t maintain more than a few seconds. After the main three dangers, there are plenty of poisonous snakes that can swim, and a nasty little fish called the Candiru, a tiny member of the catfish family. If you urinate while in the water, the ammonia will attract them and one will swim up a person’s urethra and die there. It’s extremely painful to have a small fish swim up your private parts, but they have to be removed by surgery as they lock themselves in place with backward-facing scales and can’t be pulled out. If they aren’t removed then they will die and begin to rot, causing the victim to die from an infection beginning in the bladder.

Mold and fungus

There are stories of people from Western countries who visit the Amazon, especially people from military units who claim they get mold growing in some of the strangest places. After a few days in the wrong clothing, mold and fungus can rapidly grow as the warm and constantly wet conditions provide the perfect breeding ground for the spores. People have claimed they found mold growing in all areas of clothing after a few days, and even spore clusters forming in people’s armpits.

Infection and parasites

Tropical climates provide the perfect conditions for infections to breed, and nowhere is bigger and has more variation of bacteria than the Amazon. A tiny cut on the hand in England will be nothing to worry about, but the same size wound in the Amazon will see it swell and fill with infected pus in 24 hours. The only way to deal with wounds in this endless green sea is to have the proper medicine, with antibiotics being a must-have. Infection is one of the biggest killers for people who get stranded here, and flies will quickly lay eggs in any wound big enough.

One of the most famous stories of people being stranded in the Amazon is of a woman named Juliane Koepcke who was injured in a plane crash and suffered a deep cut on her arm. Flies quickly laid eggs in the wound which hatched into maggots, but luckily she found an old fishing hut with a can of petrol inside and poured it into the wound, something her father taught her to do in an emergency, which caused all the maggots to wriggle out.

Drinking water isn’t a problem here but it must be collected from rainfall and never from streams or rivers. There is a ridiculous amount of bacteria and parasites in Amazon water systems and a good way to get sick is to drink from any of them. professional water filters, purifying tablets, and boiling must be used if you’re forced to use water from a stream or river, but with the constant rainfall and water collecting on leaves, this isn’t normally a problem.

So now you have a better idea of how dangerous the Amazon rainforest is, but it’s not all doom and horror, due to its size, there are plenty of safer tourist areas that offer cruises, jungle camping, and river swimming, but with something of this size the area you go to and the country it’s in will make a big difference.

A few interesting facts about the Amazon

• An estimated 47 million people live within the borders of the Amazon, with 2 million of these being Indigenous tribes that live autonomously.

• Across all of South America, the trees of the Amazon release 20 billion tons of water into the air every day.

• There are around 400 billion trees that make up the Amazon.

• Over 95% of all deaths each year in the Amazon are linked to crime, with the rest being made up of accidents and only a handful of people dying from getting lost.

• There are more than 3,000 different types of fruit that grow in the forest.

• The Amazon was named by a Spanish explorer named Francisco de Orellana who was attacked by a group of warrior women along a stretch of the river. He named the river he was on the Amazon after the warrior women he read about in Greek mythology, the fantasy Amazonian women who have been shown in so many films and books over the years. The name of that one river then spread and over the years became known as representing the whole jungle and all its river systems.