Lowland tapir

Lowland tapirs eat plants.

They eat fruit, leaves and twigs. They eat lots of palm fruit.

Lowland tapirs feed mostly at night on fruit, leaves and other parts of plants. They are browsers, picking leaves and twigs, and they also eat lots of fruit, including the fruit of the moriche palm.

Tapirs swallow many seeds whole. The seeds come out unharmed in their dung in new places, so tapirs help new trees and palms grow. Tapir dung is even food for other animals: some squirrels eat seeds from it, and dung beetles spread the seeds further.

The diet is fruit, leaves and other plant material, browsed mainly at night (Animal Diversity Web). Fruit of the moriche palm (Mauritia flexuosa) is a crucial food in the dry season, and the IUCN describes tapirs as the prime seed dispersers of this palm. Digestion generally leaves swallowed seeds undamaged, as with assai palm fruit.

The Tapir Specialist Group highlights tapirs as seed dispersers that help gene flow in plant populations, may be especially important for large palm seeds, and may help degraded forests regrow by dropping seeds into tree-fall gaps. Their dung feeds other animals, such as the Atlantic forest squirrel, which eats seeds from it, and dung beetles, which spread seeds further.

Tapirs rest in the forest in the day.

At night they come out to eat. They run into water when danger comes.

Lowland tapirs usually live alone. They stay in the shelter of the forest during the day and come out to feed at night. Mothers travel with their young.

They live close to water and swim well. If a jaguar or another predator chases them, they run into water or thick bushes. Tapirs talk with sounds: a shriek means fear or pain, clicks help tapirs recognize each other, and snorts and puffs show that a tapir is angry or annoyed. They also mark their areas with urine.

Lowland tapirs are typically solitary and, though not strictly nocturnal, shelter in forest by day and feed at night; pairs are seen during mating and when mothers travel with young (Animal Diversity Web). They prefer to live close to water and swim well.

The jaguar is the main natural predator. Alarmed tapirs flee to water or dense brush, and a cornered tapir may charge. Vocalizations include shrieks of fear or pain, clicks that may identify individuals, aggressive nasal snorts and irritated puffing; urine and facial glands are used to scent-mark. Though generally rare and elusive, tapirs can be locally common around salt licks and water sources (IUCN).

Lowland tapirs are in danger in many places.

People hunt them and cut down their forests. Some parks keep them safe.

The lowland tapir is Vulnerable. Its forests are being cut down, people hunt it for meat, cars hit it on roads, and cattle compete with it. Because a mother is pregnant for more than a year and has one baby at a time, tapir numbers recover slowly.

In some regions, such as the Caatinga in north-eastern Brazil, tapirs have disappeared completely. In Argentina, people are working to bring tapirs back to the Esteros del Iberá wetlands, and protected areas give tapirs safe places to live.

The IUCN lists Tapirus terrestris as Vulnerable (Varela et al.; assessed 31 July 2018, published 2019), with a decreasing trend. Main threats are deforestation, hunting for meat, road-kill and competition with livestock, and the impact of hunting is amplified by slow reproduction. Populations are severely reduced and fragmented in the Cerrado, Chaco, Atlantic Forest and llanos; the species is extirpated from the Caatinga and has disappeared from about half of its original range in Argentina.

Population size is unknown; published density estimates range from 0.2 to 3.7 tapirs per square kilometer. A reintroduction effort is under way in Corrientes province, Argentina (Esteros del Iberá).