He ate worms and drank urine: a lost man lived in the jungle for a month

“If it wasn’t for the rain, I would have died”

A man who got lost in the Amazon rainforest for a month claims he ate worms and drank his own urine to survive. A Bolivian lost in the jungle says it helped him learn how to survive after he got lost from friends while hunting in January.

Jonathan Acosta, 30, from Bolivia, who claimed to have gotten lost and wandered alone in the Amazon region for a month, said he ate insects and worms, took water in his boots and drank his own urine to stay alive.

If confirmed, Acosta could become one of the longest-lived lost loners in the Amazon, according to Agence France-Presse.

“Knowing how to survive helped me a lot: I had to eat insects, drink my own urine, eat worms,” the man told Unitel TV on Tuesday. “Animals attacked me.”

Acosta was reported missing by his family at the end of January. He went hunting in the Amazon rainforest with four friends, but separated from his group on January 25th.

Exactly one month later, last Saturday, a missing man was found by search and rescue teams.

Jonathan Acosta told Unitel that it was raining half the time he wandered through the jungle. He used his rubber boots to collect all the rainwater he could. But when the sky cleared of clouds, he had to drink his own urine.

“I asked God for rain,” Acosta recalls. “If it hadn’t been raining, I wouldn’t have survived.”

A disoriented Acosta said he walked about 40 km in search of civilization, but soon found himself walking in circles. During his ordeal, he is said to have lost 17 kg and sprained his ankle.

Being exposed to bad weather at night, according to him, he was bitten by a variety of creatures. His sister, Miladde Acosta, told Unitel TV that her brother “had to fight a pig, which is a wild and dangerous animal” and a feline predator was lurking nearby, CBS reported.

“I am very happy and grateful,” Acosta told the TV channel after reuniting with his family.

In another well-known case in Bolivia, Israeli adventurer Yossi Ginsberg survived three weeks on the Amazon in 1981 – a feat that inspired the film The Jungle, starring Daniel Radcliffe, recalls Agence France-Presse.

In Brazil, pilot Antonio Sena survived 38 days on the Amazon after crash landing in 2021. The following year, two brothers aged seven and nine were rescued after spending 25 days lost in the Brazilian rainforest.