Big fish

The New York Times has an article (with it's usual fuck-you-no-upload video by Nadia Sussman) by Simon Romero about some really big fish in the Amazon:

As the howler monkeys roared near Tefé, Brazil, in the far reaches of the Amazon rain forest, Valdenor da Silva grasped his harpoon and guided his canoe through the dazzling floodplain mosaic of lakes and channels in a quest for his prey.
“The river giants are plentiful this year,” said da Silva, 44, a father of eight who puts food on his family’s table by hunting down the pirarucu, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish. Flashing a smile, the fisherman, standing just over five feet tall and weighing a hundred and sixty pounds, added: “Every pirarucu I’ve harpooned this season is bigger than I am.”
In piranha-infested waters, fishermen go in search of the pirarucu, which can grow as long as seven feet and weigh more than four hundred pounds, placing them in the ranks of freshwater megafish like the Giant Pangasius (often called the dog-eating catfish) and the Mekong giant catfish, both found in the distant Mekong River basin in Vietnam.
With overfishing and habitat degradation threatening such Goliaths in different parts of the world, riverbank dwellers and biologists in the Amazon are working together to save the pirarucu by prohibiting outsiders from catching the fish and overhauling their own methods of pursuing it.
Their effort to save the fish is yielding a pioneering conservation success story in the Amazon while offering a strategy for fending off a broader freshwater extinction crisis, according to fisheries experts who track the depletion of big fish in the world’s rivers and lakes.
“Just a short while ago, we feared that wild pirarucu could disappear from the Amazon,” said Ruiter Braga, a fishing technician for Mamirauá, a rain forest reserve that helped develop the management regime, during which the stocks of pirarucu in the area have climbed more than four hundred percent. “But we figured out that the only way to save the pirarucu was to involve the people living in the forest who depend on the fish for their own survival.”
Authorities began by issuing a general ban on pirarucu fishing in 1996 in Amazonas— the giant Brazilian state in the Amazon River basin that is three times the size of California— but granting local peoples exclusive fishing rights to waters in their territory.
Some riverbank villages also prohibited the use of curtain-like gill nets, which are used to vertically ensnare the pirarucu, called arapaima in English. And, crucial to boosting the size of the pirarucu, communities also commanded the release of pirarucu smaller than five feet, allowing potential spawners to grow; pirarucu generally reach maturity at three to four years.
While cast nets are still permitted in some places, pirarucu fishing otherwise returned to its roots, a tradition involving little more than harpoons, wooden clubs, canoes, and a great deal of patience.
During the dry season, when water levels fall in the Amazon’s wetlands, fishermen fan out in their canoes looking for pirarucu, which rise to the surface to breathe air every fifteen minutes or so, a result of a labyrinthine organ that enables the fish to survive in oxygen-poor waterways.
Once the pirarucu is spotted, the frenzied pursuit resembles seal hunting almost as much as it does fishing. Interrupting the eerie calm of the forest, fishermen impale the pirarucu with their spearlike projectiles. When lashing about, the pirarucu are often strong enough to capsize the fishermen’s small canoes, casting them into waters teeming with caimans and piranhas.
When a fish is hauled in, it is pulled halfway into the canoe, and the fishermen then use wooden clubs to bludgeon it on the head several times to get the job done. In the end the pirarucu, often larger than the men pursuing it, emits a death groan sounding like something between a murmur and a gurgle.
“Going after pirarucu isn’t for everybody, but we treasure every single part of the fish,” said Henrique Alcione Batalha, 46, a fisherman from the community of São Francisco da Capivara, as he and his family feasted one evening on the viscera and head of pirarucu, prepared with a sprinkling of manioc flour and eaten the day it was caught.
Some villages even use the pirarucu’s scales as nail files or ornaments, while the fish’s bony tongue is used for grating guaraná, the caffeinated Amazonian berry considered an aphrodisiac by some Brazilians, and consumed in soft drinks around the country.
But a larger trade involves selling pirarucu meat, consumed for centuries in boneless steaks coveted as a delicacy in the Amazon. Some of the larger pirarucu fetch more than two hundred dollars each when sold whole in the street markets in Amazonian outposts, bolstering the income of families subsisting on the fish they catch and the manioc they grow on small plots of land.
“Pirarucu was one of the most important food fishes in the Amazon long before the Europeans arrived,” said Donald Stewart, a fisheries biologist at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “The early explorers soon learned that the meat could be salted and dried in the sun, and then it would last for a long time without spoiling.”
While lacking the subtle flavors of the non0salted variety, salted pirarucu is rising in popularity in parts of Brazil. It is marketed as “cod of the Amazon” in a bid to compete with bacalhau, the dried, salted, and strong-smelling cod that is often fished in Norway and imported to Brazil, where it is a costly staple of Portuguese-inspired cuisine.
More than fourteen hundred fishermen in and around Mamirauá take part in the pirarucu management regime, hewing to quotas and tagging each fish they catch. In 2013, fishermen took home an average of about six hundred dollars each from pirarucu fishing, a welcome sum in far-flung villages. Still, illegal pirarucu fishing flourishes in parts of the Amazon, lowering prices for the fish in street markets.
While fisheries experts are generally encouraged by projects that have recovered badly overexploited pirarucu populations in some pockets of the rain forest, the illicit trade, especially in the neighboring state of Pará, has caused the megafish to disappear near large cities, while threatening its survival in some forest settlements.
“We’re hoping the pirarucu can withstand such challenges, since a die-off would rob villages across the Amazon of their lifeblood,” said Claudio Batalha, 47, a coordinator of the fishing project here. “Without making such fishing sustainable, more outsiders could claim the forest as their own,” he added. “That’s when the threat of greater forest devastation gets real.”

Rico says he's just as happy not to have to catch the big tuna he eats in Japanese restaurants...