- Narrator: Jake
The Animorphs steal a Bug Fighter, but run afoul of the Blade Ship, leaving them stranded in the Amazon Rainforest— several hours in the past.
Tropes:
- Ant War: To get the army ants off of Rachel, Jake uses another colony of army ants, which works, as the ants stop trying to eat Rachel and go to war with the other colony.
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Bizarro Episode: In our first example of a Sario Rip, the main characters and a few villains time travel to a few hours ago, but Jake is the only one actually there and the others are actually temporal memories. Jake gets killed, snaps back to his past body, and the adventure gets erased from reality. - Book Dumb: Ax admits he wasn't paying attention in school when he was supposed to learn about Sario Rips, limiting the information the Animorphs have on how to fix one.
- Eaten Alive: Rachel as a grizzly bear falls unconscious on top of an ant mound. By the time she wakes up, they're eating her inside her eyes and ears.
- Mighty Roar: Jake roars as a tiger to draw the attention of several Hork-Bajir Controllers. The rainforest momentarily goes silent for miles as the roar echoes around.
- Mischief-Making Monkey: The spider monkey morphs are described as being "like a human, but more excitable". A minute after morphing, the Animorphs get caught up in the monkey's ability to frolic through the trees.
- Nature Is Not Nice: Rachel is nearly killed by the rainforest fauna, first by army ants eating her alive, then by a shoal of piranhas. She screams about how the rainforest people want to save is a deathtrap and how she wouldn't mind if the entire place was paved over.
- Negative Space Wedgie: A Sario Rip is a rift in time caused by a large energy output, like two Dracon beams colliding. The rift can transport those near it to the past or future, and must be collapsed in order to fix the paradox.
- Never Shall The Selves Meet: Even worse than that, meeting each other isn't necessary for the time paradox to annihilate the past and future versions of the characters.
- Piranha Problem: Rachel runs into a stream to get rid of the ants eating her, and is almost immediately set upon by a shoal of piranhas.
- Poisoned Weapons: Cassie makes note of the frog poison the natives use on their spears to make them lethal. Jake later uses a poisoned spear to take down Visser Three.
- Snakes Are Sinister:
- Jake's tiger is nearly killed when an eyelash viper bites him unprovoked.
- Visser Three acquires an Amazonian snake to search the jungle. This contrasts the Animorphs, who use monkeys and jaguars.
- Temporal Paradox: The adventure gets erased from existence when Jake snaps back from the future and aborts the mission. He later finds he can't morph into the monkey or the jaguar, as he never acquired them in the new timeline.
- The World Is Just Awesome: The Animorphs have this reaction as they transverse the rainforest as jaguars. Rachel even changes her mind about paving the forest over now that she's an apex predator who has nothing to fear from it.
