iStockphoto / elleon
The Amazon Rainforest is home to roughly 10% of all known species on earth and get this, 1 new species is discovered in the Amazon every other day. With such abundant life, the viral video below showing more Amazon caimans than the eyes can see shouldn’t be so shocking yet here we are.
Taking one step back, the headline says ‘alligators‘ and it’s important to clarify that these are Amazon black caimans which are crocodilians and members of the family Alligatoridae. I said ‘alligators’ strictly for the purposes of the headline because most of the BroBible readership is based in the US and we’re more familiar with alligators here than caimans. Now that we’ve settled that alligator-caiman-crocodile disclaimer, we can move on…
The videos below were posted to TikTok by @cielo.henrique who was on a boat in the ‘reserva do piranha interior de mpu Amazonas.’ It’s not clear specifically where this piranha reserve is in the Amazon but what we know is it’s PACKED full of caimans. We know this because suddenly, more caimans materialize in the water than the eyes can see. They are EVERYWHERE.
As a self-styled dog person, I can’t help but respect that dog on the front of the boat barking at the thousands of Amazon caimans as if the dog is in charge. And as a dog-owner, I can’t help but get sweaty palms thinking about what would happen if that dog was overzealous and jumped in the water.
And because this is TikTok, we have to look at the other recent videos this account posted from deep in the Amazon jungle. This one shows a dock that has been completely taken over by armored catfish (Pterygoplichthys sp.), an invasive species here in Florida that’s taken over rivers in the middle of the state.
Seeing those armored catfish like that is wild. The last time I canoed on the upper portions of the Peace River here in Florida they were stacked up just like that in the Amazon. I guess that’s their natural state which means it’s chilling to think that’s where we’re headed here in Florida.
Evidently, they’re edible if you throw them on a fire alongside piranha:
Never until this moment has it occurred to me that you could get full from eating piranha. They’re typically such a small fish I’d assumed there was no point in eating them because they’d be bony and you would need to eat a ton of them to make a meal. But that dude is cooking them up in the same river all of those Amazon caimans were in.
What do all of those Amazon caimans, crocodiles, and alligators look like on land?
There was a viral video from back in March that blew people’s minds. To be fair, there was some fear-mongering attached with people calling it an ‘invasion’ of crocs on the beach. When the reality of the situation was these Amazon black caimans were just sunning themselves on the sand.
In Brazil, an invasion of crocodiles that have flooded one of the beaches with several hundred, even thousands, and the local population is panicking pic.twitter.com/3xnkqHdoyl
— Ken Rutkowski (@kenradio) September 15, 2022
That video appears to have been credited to this Instagram account where the bio is written in the Indonesian language. They posted footage of the caimans on September 1st and from there it made its way to Twitter and Reddit, each time being framed as ‘locals are FREAKING OUT’ when in reality, the Pantanal is the largest wetland on planet earth.
Roughly 200,000 people live in the Pantanal but it’s so dang big the population density is 1.8 inhabitants/square kilometer compared to the overall Brazilian population density of 17 inhabitants/square kilometer.
We’re talking about 42 MILLION acres here, with an estimated 10,000,000 caimans swimming around. There is approximately ZERO local population that is worried about an ‘invasion’ of caimans because they’re already there. It’s not as if you hear people from Florida and Louisiana crying about an invasion of alligators. And that’s because the gators are exactly where they’re expected to be, just as these caimans are where they’re supposed to be.