Arapaima: The Fish That Could Save the Amazon

After decades of intensive and uncontrolled exploitation, fishing is now controlled and managed by local communities. This creates new economic opportunities, guarantees essential food, and protects the environment.

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Arapaima emerges from the waters of an Amazonian river

A fish that could change the fate of the Amazon, creating new economic and development opportunities in the forest. Benefiting the environment and local communities. The arapaima (called in Portuguese “pirarucù”), It can reach three meters in length and weigh up to 2000 kilograms: with these measurements, it is the largest scaled freshwater fish in the world. For years, thanks to its size and firm, delicate flesh, it has been a cornerstone of the food chain of the Amazon rainforest populations: for decades, it was fished and sold in Manaus, an Amazonian city of 2,2 million inhabitants.

Then came the environmental destroyers and in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the intensive fishing It brought it close to collapse in many areas. And even in the first decade of the 2000s, scientists reported overfishing and harmful fishing of the arapaima in 90 percent of the villages monitored along a stretch of the Amazon River and its tributaries. Because it was large, valuable, and easy to catch when it rose to breathe, populations declined dramatically.

Local fishermen in canoes along an Amazon river

The turning point came when some Amazonian communities, together with researchers and environmental authorities, claimed the right to protect this fish and adopted a very simple but rigorous management system:

  • Every year, residents count the arapaima by observing how many times they surface to breathe;
  • only a portion of the population (often about 30 percent of adults) can be fished;
  • the rest is left to reproduce;
  • Illegal fishing is controlled by the inhabitants themselves.

The results were astonishing. In many reserves managed in this way, arapaima numbers increased several-fold in just a few years, while community incomes increased thanks to the legal sale of the fish. Scientific studies have documented recoveries more than tenfold compared to unprotected areas. In 2016, for example, Carlos Peres, a Brazilian professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, in collaboration with Joao Victor Campos-Silva, an ecologist specializing in the environmental and social impacts of arapaima, published a study of 83 lakes and found that the 13 open to free fishing contained just 9 arapaima specimens, while the 31 where free fishing was prohibited contained more than 300 individuals. Today, in the state of Amazonas, the epicenter of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, more than 400 villages independently manage and monitor arapaima fishing in large parts of the Amazon basin.

All of this can change the future of the Amazon in a truly sustainable way. First, it creates a strong economic incentive to maintain intact aquatic ecosystems and the surrounding forest; if a community benefits annually from a healthy arapaima population, it has an interest in preventing local fishing, combating illegal land occupation, preventing the destruction of wetlands, and preserving the forest that regulates the water cycle on which the fish depend.

This model is often cited as an example of sustainable use of biodiversity: instead of completely prohibiting the use of natural resources, a limited extraction is allowed which finances their conservation.

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