Goliath birdeater

Where does the goliath birdeater live?

Home: Rainforests of the Guiana Shield in northern South America.

In the wild you find it in: Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, Brazil.

The short profile

Fully grown it measures Leg span up to 30 cm. It weighs about 0 175 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

Despite its alarming name, the goliath birdeater rarely eats birds; it mostly hunts on the forest floor at night for insects, worms, frogs and the occasional small rodent, using fangs up to 2 cm long to inject venom that is actually mild and roughly as painful to a human as a wasp sting. If threatened, rather than biting first, it prefers to rub bristly, barbed hairs off its abdomen with its legs, flicking them into the air toward an attacker; these hairs cause intense itching and irritation if they land in skin or eyes. It can also make a surprisingly loud hissing sound by rubbing bristles on its legs together, called stridulation, as a warning before resorting to more drastic defences. Goliath birdeaters live in burrows and can survive for over a year without eating. They remain common in their remote rainforest range.

Find it on the globe

Goliath birdeater 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.