By Stefan Lovgren
The arapaima fish, (click here) native to the Amazon River basin, can weigh as much as 400 pounds faces extinction.
Manaus, Brazil - This year’s unusually severe fires (click here) in the Amazon have not only attracted widespread international attention, but also illuminated the effects of mounting deforestation in the region, from evaporating rains to rising carbon dioxide emissions. Yet one effect of forest loss in the Amazon has largely been ignored: how it influences the river system and the fish living in it.
There are few places in the world where aquatic and arboreal life are brought together as closely as they are in the Amazon. While the rainforest is home to the world’s largest river (by volume of water) and 1,700 tributaries, about one-sixth of the basin is also made up of largely forest-covered wetlands that flood for long periods each year and support the commercially most important fish in the region.
“This flood pulse is the driving force governing all the ecological functions and interactions along the river basin, and it creates flooded forests that are crucial for the survival and reproduction of hundreds of fish species in the Amazon,” says Jansen Zuanon, a fish biologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus....
...“If we don’t protect these areas, the rivers will not be the same and we will lose the fish,” says Leandro Castello, a tropical ecologist at Virginia Tech’s Global Change Center, who has studied the links between forest and fish in the Amazon....
