CULTURING PERU
With a large but erratic fish export market, Peru could use some sustainability. Adrian Love looks at one project that’s serving hobbyists and locals alike.
With a large but erratic fish export market, Peru could use some sustainability. Adrian Love looks at one project that’s serving hobbyists and locals alike.
THE AMAZON River at Iquitos, despite being 2,200 miles from where it empties into the sea, is an awesome sight to behold. Standing on the pier of one of the bustling markets it’s just possible to make out the treeline on the opposite shore, two miles away. Like a South American Venice, Iquitos seems to perch upon the very water that sustains it. It’s located at a conflagration of three rivers; the Nanay, Itaya and the Ucayali, the headwater of the Amazon itself.
More so than most other cities, the existence of Iquitos depends on the river: apart from the small airfield there is no other way into the city, and since the rubber boom at the turn of the 19th century, the natural riches of the Amazon forest have been shipped from its port. Moreover, since the 1930s, Iquitos has also been the centre of Peru’s ornamental fish export business.
My reason for being here was to meet up with Dr. Anthony Mazeroll who, since 2010, has been developing the Amazon Research Centre for Ornamental Fishes (ARCOF), 10km southwest of the city. Anthony has kept fish all his life, and the passion grew into a scholarly career. He began working in the Amazon in 2004, conducting research on the impacts of invasive species on aquatic ecosystems. What became increasingly evident was the need to develop a sustainable approach to the aquarium industry — and where better to site it than at the heart of the fish export industry?
Big business
It was an Amazonian species, the humble Neon tetra, Paracheirodon
innesi, that first popularised tropical fish keeping as a hobby upon its commercial introduction in 1936. Since then, the export business has grown substantially. Although only the third largest exporter in South America (after Columbia and Brazil), well over 10 million fish are exported from Peru every year to no less than 24 different countries.
In 2015, the value of exports to the EU alone was just over $1million making ornamental fish the third most valuable export product in the region after timber and oil. The sustainability of this trade has interested scientists and fishkeepers alike for many years, which is why Dr Mazeroll was here.
Surprisingly, of the millions of fishes traded, and the 300+ ornamental species found in the area, only a relatively small handful of fish make up 70% of the export species. These include tiny Otocinclus catfish, Silver arowana, Osteoglossum bicirrhosum, the Bleeding heart tetra,
Hyphessobrycon erythrostigma, and Corydoras catfish.
Many of the mainstays of the aquarium industry, such as tetras and other characins or callichthyid catfishes, are relatively short lived, reproduce at a young age, and are naturally adapted to deal with high mortality rates. Their populations are known to be robust to high levels of exploitation pressure.
Moreover, ornamental fish are still collected by extensive, traditional methods including scoop nets and dugout canoes. Collection times are restricted to the dry season (locally known as the low season in reference to the receding water levels that concentrate the fish together), allowing recovery of populations between October and May, during the wet season when water levels are high. These high levels disperse the fish over a wider area and make commercial collection impossible (and they typically coincide with the breeding season). Wild caught aquarium fish could be one of the few sustainable resources in the Amazon region.
Seeing opportunities
Dr Mazeroll is all too aware of the opportunities as well as the challenges. “Aquarium fishing is relatively lucrative,” he tells me. A large Oscar sold for food might earn a fishermen 1 Sole (about 25p), whereas any ornamental species he collects is worth much more. Aquarium fish sales provide a higher daily income than farming or day-labour but it is very seasonal. In the high (wet) season, the 10,000 or so aquarium fish collectors in the area that find their quarry too dispersed to catch must find alternative income sources, many of which can be much less sustainable — logging and hunting bushmeat, for example. If these fishermen could be encouraged to farm fish it would reduce the pressure on some wild populations of fish, provide a regular, dependable income, and relieve pressure on the surrounding forest for the eight months of the year when the fishing is poor.
In the economy of Iquitos, this is particularly welcome. In some of the poorer neighbourhoods as many as 40% of children do not receive a full education. Basic classroom materials, such as pencils and paper, are not provided by the state, and a colossal 62% of the population of the city live below the poverty line.
The wider picture
The aim of ARCOF to promote the sustainable collection of aquarium fish is not unique. Other programmes such as Project Piaba in Brazil have been conducting research and campaigning for over 25 years. But Dr Mazerroll had a wider vision as he began working in Peru: to create a long term, balanced ecosystem that serves the local economy as well as enhancing and conserving the environment, to drive research focused on sustainable breeding of the local fishes, and to provide education and practical training schemes to encourage local fishermen to set up their own fish farms. In summary, to provide an educational and research facility to study the local ecosystem and educate the local population on how to sustain their valuable ornamental fish industry.
No doubt, most people would recognize these goals as laudable, and support the vision of the centre. But Dr Mazeroll has committed more than good intentions; he has largely funded the whole project singlehandedly.
Firm foundations
The site of ARCOF was bought in 2008, selected due to its proximity to Iquitos but with an uncontaminated spring that flowed even in the dry season. It was this site that Dr Mazeroll and I found ourselves driving up to in a rickety mototaxi (the Peruvian rickshaw) before he gave me the tour.
As we walk around the site, he admits that progress has been frustratingly slow, due to a combination of maintaining funding and negotiating with the local government. However, the site was enclosed within a substantial wall early this year. With the security that the wall conferred, building could begin in earnest and I was shown offices, as well as a water chemistry and pathology laboratory.
Eventually it is planned that the dormitories for 12 visitors/students,
and a culture area with a 12x20m recirculating system will be completed. Also on the plans are a conference centre, an ichthyological museum containing some of the many representative specimens of the Peruvian fish fauna, and a small public aquarium to engage the local interest and bring in extra income. A borehole supplies water at a pH of 7.6-7.8 but the water then sits in a small reservoir located in the centre of the site where the surrounding vegetation brings the pH down to 6.5-6.8.
In broken Spanish, I ask a worker in the pond: how’s the water? “COLD!” he shivers. It was 26°C.
The centre admitted its first groups of students and visitors in summer 2019. Though a self-proclaimed fish geek, Dr Mazeroll wants any and all interested parties to be able to use the facilities whether they are studying fish, insects, primates, the famous pink river dolphins, or even the extraordinary diversity of birdlife found in the area.
Though blackwater and whitewater habitats may be familiar terms, it is not often appreciated how nearby these two ecosystems exist
Alien culture
One of the key employees at ARCOF is Carlos Chuquipiondo. After working for the Peruvian national fish hatchery and aquarium fish wholesalers, Carlos joined ARCOF to develop the fish culture facilities. He and Dr Mazeroll are being strategic about the fish they farm, concentrating on rare species with a high demand and an equally high price tag. Species such as
Pseudoplatystoma tigrinum, the Tiger shovelnose which is a very popular food fish, and Pseudohemiodon cf.
apithanos, the Chameleon whiptail, an apparently endemic variety that was in many of the tanks at a nearby wholesaler I visited.
Fish farming is not new to the area but has brought its own issues. The main species cultured is undoubtedly the mighty Arapaima which is eaten as paiche throughout South America. Arapaima are carnivores and many fish species are reared as food fish for them including guppies (also used for
mosquito control) and Three spot gourami, Trichopodus trichopterus.
When the ponds flood these little fish invade the network of channels that serve as drainage and open sewers, criss-crossing the whole of Iquitos and eventually draining into the main river channels. Here the invaders out compete native species. But invasive species can come in very surprising forms. Dr Mazeroll, who has published scientific papers on the taxonomy of Discus,
Symphysodon sp., tells me that the king of aquarium fishes is an invader in the River Nanay, which flanks the northern border of Iquitos. “They’ve escaped from wholesalers and farms,” he says. “They’re regularly caught by the collectors because the population is so near to the markets, but the fish don’t have the spectacular markings of the fish in their native rivers.”
Clashing waters
Though we pigeonhole a fish as an ‘Amazonian species’, it is difficult to comprehend just how different the rivers of the Amazon can be. Though blackwater and whitewater habitats may be familiar terms, it is not often appreciated how nearby these two ecosystems exist.
Dr Mazeroll has found the main body of the Amazon river at Iquitos to have a pH between 7.6 and 7.8 due to the minerals eroded from the Andes at its source, but the little tributaries running into it are below 7.0 and can reach down to 3.8.
These acidic waters still have fish in, such as characins like Crenuchus
spilurus and Poecilocharax weitzmani, as well as killifish like Rivulus spp. Many widespread fish will be found in a range of different rivers of the Amazon catchment and will therefore tolerate a wide range of chemistries. But others with much narrower distributions will be very specifically adapted to a narrow habitat with narrow environmental parameters.
The meeting of water types such as whitewater and blackwater are regular sights as you travel along the river. Dr Mazeroll has been involved in research showing that many species of fish patrol up and down the border of the two waters, creating fish densities up to nine times greater than in the adjacent water.
Surprisingly, despite their prevalence, many iconic Amazonian
species such as Oscars, Severums, Plecostomus and piranha do not make it onto the export list, but despite this they are still very well known to the locals, as food.
Plecostomus are highly prized as the main ingredient in a local soup but they deteriorate very rapidly so cannot be transported dead. Instead, they are stored alive in pens upstream of Iquitos and brought down daily to the markets.
The Peruvian government, with the best of intentions, has banned the collection of juvenile food fish for the ornamental trade. However, many question the value of the restriction, given that many of the species protected are abundant, geographically widespread and have high reproductive rates. Of more pressing concern are species with restricted geographical ranges (for example, some loricariid catfish and dwarf cichlids endemic to rainforest streams), and late-maturing species with low reproductive output such as stingrays and arowana. Particularly since, as is the nature of all such commodities, the rarer the catch the greater the value.
As we walk down from the
Research Centre, Dr Mazeroll and I watch the fish swarming in the drainage ditches that line the dusty track. They are mostly guppies, but Dr Mazeroll points out dwarf cichlids swimming amongst them. It’s a fitting analogy of the richness and frailty of this ecosystem, and the potential of one person to change the fortunes of the local fishermen, giving them, and the aquarium fish of the area, a sustainable future.