Along the Jurua River, a tributary of the Amazon, riverine settlers and Indigenous villages are working together to promote the sustainable fishing of near magic fish called pirarucu. Several meters long and weighing hundreds of kilograms, the Amazon’s pirarucu was almost fished to extinction. But the creation of sustainable development reserves in Brazil has ensured the giant fish, and its indigenous hunters are flourishing again.
Also known as the paiche or the pirarucu, the arapaima is an air-breathing fish that plies the rainforest rivers of South America’s Amazon Basin and nearby lakes and swamps. One of the world’s largest freshwater fish species, these giants can grow up to 15 feet long and weigh up to 440 pounds, though fish that big have not been reported for many years. More commonly, they’re about six feet long and 200 pounds.
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.
The resurgence of one of the world’s largest freshwater fish is the result of Brazil’s years-long efforts to combine scientific and traditional know-how to preserve the country’s rich biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods for indigenous communities in the Amazon.
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 acai, 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 controlled fishing has led to a surge in its population in regions where it’s employed. In Sao Raimundo region, there were 1,335 pirarucus in the nearby lakes in 2011, when the managed fishing began. Last year, there were 4,092 specimens, according to their records.
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In the Carauari region, the number of pirarucu spiked from 4,916, in 2011, to 46,839, ten years later.
The Medio Jurua region is blessed with remoteness. It has no access by road. So far it is free from the deforestation and fire that have been devastating elsewhere in the Amazon. But the smoke that has left the skies grayish in September is a reminder that the destruction is not far away. The challenge is to be a strong organization and economy to stave off future threats.
