One of Earth’s biggest freshwater fish is bouncing back, a rare ‘win win’
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The 10-foot-long arapaima was quickly disappearing in Brazil until local communities stepped in to save it—and themselves.
Giant freshwater fish are among the most endangered animals on Earth. But in the lush waterways of the Amazon, one leviathan is swimming against the current.
Meet the arapaima, a fish capable of growing up to 10 feet long and weighing up to 500 pounds. Just over a decade ago, this popular seafood species faced extinction, its numbers ravaged by overfishing. But conservation efforts spearheaded by local communities have turned things around for the arapaima, with populations increasing dramatically across the Amazon.
In areas where communities have adopted sustainable fishing practices, arapaima numbers increased 425 percent in 11 years, according to research by João Campos-Silva, a Brazilian ecologist and National Geographic Explorer. He is part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Amazon Expedition—a two-year scientific exploration of the river basin. The number has since grown to 600 percent, though those results have not yet been published, he says.
To date, Campos-Silva has worked with around 40 communities along the Juruá River, a major Amazon tributary that traverses mostly pristine rainforest in western Brazil. Overall in the Amazon, around 1,100 communities have adopted conservation initiatives for the fish, which are listed as data deficient by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The arapaima’s resurgence is a conservation triumph that can serve as a blueprint for safeguarding other large aquatic species in the Amazon and globally, he says. And it highlights the crucial role of local communities in leading successful conservation endeavors.
“For many, many decades, people have been looking to the outside for solutions to the problems in the Amazon, but the arapaima story shows that the answers are often in the hands of the local people and communities living in the forest,” says Campos-Silva.
The arapaima conservation success can be a model for protecting and managing populations of other endangered giant fish around the world. “These results buck an otherwise gloomy trend of severe decline of most species of aquatic megafauna,” he says. “It’s a rare example of a win-win solution that can be replicated in many areas worldwide.”
Environmental Scientist|Resource Conservation|Climate Expert|Founder of Plus One Tree Initiative
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