The hoatzin eats the leaves and some fruits and flowers of plants which grow in the wet habitats where it lives. It clambers around clumsily among the branches. Once it was thought that the species only could eat the leaves of arums and mangroves, but the species does eat the leaves of more than fifty species. One study undertaken in Venezuela found that the hoatzin diet was 82% leaves, 10% flowers, and 8% fruit.