In the Amazon, a giant fish is helping to save the rainforest
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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 kilograms, by far the largest of 2,300 known fish species in the Amazon.
It is found primarily in flood plain lakes across the Amazon basin, including in the region of Medio Jurua.
Second, the giant fish nearly vanished from Jurua not so long ago, as vessels swept the lakes with large nets.
The illegal and unsustainable fishing left Indigenous communities struggling to catch their staple food.
And it left pirarucu designated as threatened with extinction.
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 co-operating on many levels, something veterans of the Amazon say they have seen nowhere else across the vast region.
Change began in the late 1990s. With the assistance of a Dutch Catholic priest, rubber tappers organised and led a campaign to persuade the federal government to create the Medio Jurua Extractive Reserve.
They proposed 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, organised into associations, also reached an agreement with the neighbouring 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.
Managing the comeback has required social organisation, co-operation 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 kilometres of the Jurua River and is home to 35,000 people.
To see how things could have gone, look no further than the neighbouring 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 is 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, said.
Pirarucu fishing is done once a year, around September, when the water level is at its lowest.
Fishing quotas are possible because of 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.
A local fisherman and a researcher in the nearby Mamirarua region developed a way to take advantage of this, and count the fish since they stay underwater for no more than 20 minutes.
The survey is done once a year by certified fishermen, after taking a course.
By law, only 30 per cent of the pirarucu in a certain area can be fished the following year.
This controlled fishing has led to a surge in its population in regions where the method is 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, according to their records.
In the Carauari region, the number of pirarucu spiked from 4,916, in 2011, to 46,839, 10 years later.
An Associated Press team accompanied the first of the seven days of fishing in Sao Raimundo.
Picture a few dozen houses, with running water, connected by well-maintained wooden footbridges, amid açai palm trees.
Here, 34 families call it home.
Most belong to Cunha's extended family, whose ancestors arrived in the region from the impoverished and drought-ravaged north-east during the rubber boom to work as tappers.
"Our pirarucu is so tasty, everybody that eats it falls in love with it and wants more," said Rosilda da Cunha, a sister of Manoel, who lives in Sao Raimundo.
Pirarucu bring money into the community, she said.
This year, the goal is to buy a solar panel system to replace the diesel-fueled generator.
Another share of the money goes to the community members who participate in the fishing.
Women's and men's salaries are equal.
To catch pirarucu, fishermen use special, stronger nets they weave themselves.
The holes are large enough to allow smaller specimens to go through, as taking fish under five feet is prohibited.
When the fishers catch one, they haul in the net and club the fish in the head.
Then they put it in their small boat. When it's very heavy, two or three men are required to do the job.
The pirarucus are then taken from the lakes to a large boat by the Jurua River.
There they are gutted, a task that is mostly done by women, and put on ice.
All the production is bought by the Association of Rural Producers of Carauari, known as Asproc, the region's umbrella organisation, so the fishers are never at the mercy of middlemen.
Founded by rubber tappers who wanted to liberate themselves from slave-like labour conditions, Asproc has grown to be one of the most-important grassroots entities in the entire Amazon.
It runs programs on everything from sanitation, to community markets to higher education, innovating along the way.
It now sells pirarucu to Brazil's main cities, including Sao Paulo and Brasília, a complex endeavour that involves several days of transport by boat and road and usually takes more than two weeks.
Asproc's success has attracted several partnerships.
One is counterintuitive: the United States Forest Service — which supported the creation of a brand, the Gosto da Amazônia (Amazon Taste), that promotes the pirarucu nationwide — and the Agency for International Development (USAID), which helped to finance a warehouse for processing fish in Carauari city, where the pirarucu is cut, frozen and packaged.
"This project is unique as it requires a strong governance structure," USAID mission director in Brazil Ted Gehr said.
"Everybody is in agreement that they may have to sacrifice and not be able to fish all of the pirarucu that are available but knowing that they'll reproduce more, and that in the long run they will be more valuable."
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.
However, the smoke that has left the skies greyish in September is a reminder that the destruction is not far away.
The challenge is to be a strong organisation and economy to stave off future threats, Cunha says.
"Had we not organised ourselves through fishing management to protect our environments and take our fish, instead of others taking them from us, we could be in the same situation as our colleagues from Javari," Cunha — who is the head of the Medio Jurua Extractive Reserve, a position usually held by government officials — said.
