This page is the floor of the Amazon rainforest. Move your pointer and your bug will flutter, march or scuttle after you. Choose a different bug at the bottom, and tap the notes to open them.
The Amazon right now checking the sky…
Its wings contain no blue colouring. The scales are ridged so finely that they reflect only blue light.
The underside is dull brown. In flight the blue appears and vanishes with every beat, which makes it very hard for a bird to follow.
The brown underside has a row of eyespots that may startle or distract an attacker.
Adults do not visit flowers much. They feed on fermenting fruit, sap and damp mud.
The flash of a morpho's wings can be seen from several hundred metres.
The structure of its scales has been copied to make paints, fabrics and banknote markings that never fade.
Meet them all
Morpho menelaus
A very large butterfly whose wings are brilliant, shining blue above and brown with eyespots beneath.
Caligo
A very large, brown butterfly with a huge eyespot on each hindwing, like the eye of an owl.
Atta
Red-brown ants walking in a line, each one holding a piece of green leaf above its head.
Theraphosa blondi
An enormous, dark brown, hairy tarantula with a leg span the size of a dinner plate.
Scolopendra gigantea
A long, dark red centipede as thick as a finger, with bright yellow legs.
Titanus giganteus
A huge, flat, dark brown beetle with long antennae and powerful jaws.
Through the year
The Amazon is hot and wet all year, with a rainier season from about December to May. All of these can be found in any month. The bug following you is shown in red.
Good to know
Roughly a tenth of all the kinds of animal known on Earth live in the Amazon, and most of those are insects.
The ants of the rainforest, added together, are thought to weigh more than all its mammals, birds and reptiles.
Leafcutter ants have been growing a crop for something like fifty million years.
The biggest spider, one of the biggest beetles and one of the biggest centipedes all live here.
Pilots flying low over the forest have reported seeing morpho butterflies flashing below them.
When forest is cleared, the insects that depend on one kind of tree or one kind of flower go with it.
South American bugs: 1 more place
Real photos of the bugs on this page. Tap one to see it bigger.
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and are used under free licences. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews. Open a photo to see who took it.
The Amazon holds more kinds of insect than anywhere else on Earth: millions, most of them without a name. A single hectare can have more kinds of ant than the whole of Europe.
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