In the Amazon, a giant fish helps save the rainforest
CARAUARI, Brazil — Even in the most biodiverse rainforest of the world, the pirarucu, also known as arapaima, stands out.
First, there is its mammoth size: It can weigh up to 200 kilos (440 pounds), by far the largest of 2,300 known fish species in the Amazon. It is found primarily in floodplain lakes across the Amazon basin, including the region of Medio Jurua.
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Second, the giant fish not so long ago nearly vanished from Jurua, as vessels swept the lakes with large nets. The illegal and unsustainable fishing left river and Indigenous communities struggling to catch their staple food. And it left pirarucu designated as threatened with extinction, unless trade in the fish is closely controlled by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
But now something remarkable has happened. The fish has come back to the lakes of Medio Jurua. The story of how involves people of different backgrounds cooperating on many levels — a vision of what’s possible that veterans of the Amazon say they’ve seen nowhere else across the vast region.
Change began in the late 1990s. With the assistance of a Dutch Catholic priest, rubber tappers organized and led a campaign to persuade the federal government to create the Medio Jurua Extractive Reserve. They proposed that river communities could take from the forest and its lakes — up to a point — and within protected areas.
It worked. Now, local communities produce açai, vegetable oils and rubber, and they leave the forest standing. Most successful of all has been the management of pirarucu.
Riverine settler communities, organized into associations, also reached agreement with neighboring Deni Indigenous people, who have suffered in the past from invasions by rubber-tappers and fishermen. Now they are part of the managed fishing of pirarucu, which improved relations between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous.
Managing the comeback has required social organization, cooperation and complex logistics. Illegal fishing has been sharply reduced. Pirarucu are flourishing.
The virtuous cycle plays out in the region of Carauari, which stretches along 650 kilometers (404 miles) of the Jurua River and is home to 35,000 people.
To see how things could have gone, look no further than the neighboring Javari Valley, where British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were murdered last June.
The backdrop of that tragedy is a decades-old dispute between Indigenous communities and former rubber tappers who were hired by local businessmen to do illegal fishing, targeting mostly the pirarucu. Two local fishermen confessed to the crimes.
Illegal fishing is rampant in Brazil. It’s the second most frequent environmental crime on protected land, after logging, according to an academic study based on official data. Brazil´s conservation agency issued 1,160 infraction notices for illegal fishing — a quarter of all infractions — over a recent five-year period.
“Javari is a portrait of what Medio Jurua was like in the 1980s,” Manoel Cunha, the main leader of the local rubber tappers, told The Associated Press during a boat trip to Sao Raimundo, his home community and one of the ones that takes part in regulated fishing. “We managed to get rid of fishing companies and invading fishermen by monitoring and management. You have been on this river for days now, and you have not seen any fishing boats except the ones from our organizations. There is no more room for them here.”
Pirarucu fishing is done once a year, around September, the period of lowest water. Fishing quotas are possible due to another remarkable characteristic of the pirarucu: It is one of the few fish species in the world that surfaces to breathe. It does that with a big splash, flashing its red tail out of the water.
