Arapaimas are leviathans. Their heads are gray-green, but red scales spread down their backs and brighten at peak mating readiness, as though illuminated from within. Also known as the pirarucu, this fish is a window into the complexity of the Amazon.
Like other examples of the world’s apex megafauna—large animals at the top of their food chains—the arapaima not long ago was headed for extinction here in its native habitat.
It was Juruá River ribeirinhos, the people of the river, who taught me how they brought their megafish back from the brink—a lesson for all Amazonia, I believe, and maybe for the future of biodiversity on the planet.
Numbered arapaima specimens from the Lago Serrado community are analyzed.
There are so many startling things I can tell you about the arapaima: that it breathes air, for example, and must keep splashing up at the water’s surface to inhale.
That its huge scales are as tough as armor.
That its skin makes a fine leather for costly purses and shoes.
Arapaimas can weigh up to 440 pounds, making it no small task to haul one out of the water.
One boneless arapaima steak can weigh 150 pounds; it’s the biggest scaled freshwater fish in the world.
I once included in a science article a photo of a fishing family with an arapaima they had caught, one boy at the tail, another at the gills. Nine people stood side by side along that single stretched-out fish.
These fish have a very long history on the continent. We have archaeological evidence of the region’s people eating arapaima long before Europeans invaded, and arapaimas appear in some Indigenous peoples’ cosmologies.
It remains a fish of tremendous cultural and economic value: Arapaima is an important part of the local diet, and generations of fishing families have depended on income from the sale of its meat and skin.
The arapaima’s popularity is what helped bring it to near extinction. By the 1990s, more and more outsiders were working the Juruá’s waters. In many lakes that had once served as nurseries and harvest sites, the arapaimas were gone.
For ribeirinho villages, fishing collapse means disaster.
National Geographic Explorer João Campos-Silva displays the massive bony skull of an arapaima.
Photograph by Thomas Peschak
Families were losing both their income and their daily protein; overfishing depleted the supply of smaller food fish as well.
The ribeirinhos told me the natural world around them helped create the life they wanted for their children—and hanging on to that was perhaps the most crucial thing of all.
Those of us working in conservation live with too much grief these days, and around the Juruá I can see a feedback loop we don’t encounter enough in this imperiled piece of the world: people sustaining nature, nature sustaining people.
A spot of hope.
Fishing when the sun goes down, two Lago Serrado men net an impressive arapaima.
Combining scientific and traditional knowledge, the government-backed Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development in 1999 helped work out innovative rules, which are enforced to this day. As a result, most of the community lakes were closed to outsider boats.
On these protected lakes, villagers built floating guardhouses they occupy in shifts, often armed with shotguns, to keep poachers away. Local fishermen agreed to strict limits on their own harvests, which now take place only once a year, over five intense days.
Local workers at the Instituto Juruá measure arapaimas to monitor their health.
The model has so far produced spectacular, well-documented results. Researchers estimate a 600 percent increase in much of the protected area, with the brief harvests now yielding hundreds of fish.
In the villages that Instituto Juruá studies and works with, the dividing of the haul is led by families and a ribeirinho organization called ASPROC, the Association of Rural Producers of Carauari.
There is no private middleman. Earnings stay in the villages now, with group decisions about how the money will be used.
The arapaima lakes function as community savings banks. We see the results every time we visit: new solar panels, medical care, boat motors, social organizations, happiness.
This, I believe, is the way to restore and protect the natural resources of Amazonia—by recognizing that one of its natural resources is people.
Read the full findings at
National Geographic Magazine - October 2024 issue
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