Document(s) 3 de 11

Brian Harvey
Joachim Carolsfeld
World Fisheries Trust
Victoria, BC, Canada

The Idea Behind this Book

In 1996, the World Bank published Freshwater Biodiversity in Asia, with Special Reference to Fish, a technical review that has become a sourcebook for anyone interested in Asian migratory fish species.¹ The need for a companion volume on South American species was obvious, especially in a historical moment where the precarious status of inland water biodiversity was finally beginning to get the international attention it deserved. We approached the Bank, fortunately at a time when new and forward-looking ideas about water management were beginning to appear in its own reports and guidelines, and our proposal for a book on South America species, by South American authorities, was enthusiastically received. As biologists who had worked for many years with these species, both for conservation and for culture, we knew enough to side-step the task of writing the story of the migratory species ourselves – in Brazil alone, which takes up much of this book, the number of major river basins is so great, and the variety of species, life histories and lives affected so staggering, that no single author could do the subject justice. Fortunately, the region is blessed with fisheries scientists of very high calibre, and with interests broad enough that we were able to assemble a team of authors who covered most of the major river basins in Brazil, as well as the Colombian portion of the Amazon Basin. In some cases the authors worked alone; in others, their chapter is a team effort. In all cases, they were writing about their own back yards.

We believe that the material these authors provided, and which we have tried to assemble in a coherent whole, represents the first time the experience of so many local experts has been tapped and brought together to illuminate the lives of the remarkable migratory species of South America for an international audience. And there is much more here than just a wealth of biological detail. There are description of the rivers and the specific habitats the fish live in; there is discussion of the many and varied fisheries for the most important species; our authors list the threats

¹ Kottelat & Whitten, 1996

to maintaining the fish as a sustainable resource, or, in many cases, threats to a species’ very survival; they describe the legal and legislative instruments used to manage the fish; and finally each author provides a prescription for improving how these very special fish are understood and managed.

In our instructions to authors we were adamant that they describe not only the fish, but also their social importance, because the fishes’ lives intersect with the lives of people at every turn, and the business of the World Bank, who commissioned this book, is in development for people. We believe that that admonishment has paid off in a volume that will be of great interest not only to other biologists, but to managers, policy makers, community groups and conservationists as well. In the final analysis, the more development is informed by understanding of the ecosystems it affects, the better the chances of that development being truly sustainable. As instigators and editors of Migratory Fishes of South America, we sincerely hope that we are contributing to that process.

Important but Ignored

The migratory fish species of Latin America are a well-kept secret. However great their biological and cultural importance, outside their native range they are known only to biologists with a special interest in the tropics, and to the occasional especially intrepid sport fisherman or aquarist. Many people know about salmon and their prodigious migrations from the ocean to the place of their birth many kilometers upstream, but few outside South America have ever heard of the dourado or the surubim, species every bit as charismatic as salmon. True, some migratory species, like pacu and tambaqui, are farmed in Asia and the southern United States, and juveniles of these species are popular aquarium fish. But the farmed products have yet to catch on in a big way, and the baby fish grow up to be too large, and too unlovely, to keep.

But pacu and tambaqui and several dozen other large species have life histories every bit as awe-inspiring as the salmon’s. Some of them migrate more than a thousand kilometers to spawn, and unlike the salmon they do it year after year. More important, the South American migratory species feed people too, and provide them with recreation, and have a place in the hearts of Latin Americans that is every bit as important as the

iconic role played by salmon in North America and Europe. Migratory species have always been mainstays of subsistence and small-scale commercial fisheries, feeding into distribution networks that put surubim from the Amazon onto dinner plates in São Paulo and Brasilia. In the past decade these species have also stimulated the explosive growth of sport fishing that pulls in visitors not only from neighbouring cities but also from as far away as Japan and Russia.

This book is a comprehensive look at the lives, and the social importance, of the principal migratory freshwater fish species of large river systems in South America. It is unusual in several ways. First, it is written by leading Brazilian and Colombian fish biologists. Second, it covers a vast geographic area, including the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon, Paraná-Paraguay, São Francisco and Uruguay basins. Finally, it describes not only the state of current knowledge of the migratory fish species in each basin, but also their importance as food for local people.

It must be pointed out that the definition of “migratory” can be broad and varied.² Moreover, the species discussed by the authors of this book are by no means the only migratory ones in the rivers. The book concentrates on economically important species that appear to conduct obligatory reproductive migrations – in other words, those that spawn only after migrating between two distinct geographical areas. This definition of migratory fish is the one commonly accepted in Brazil, and is practical in that it identifies a group of fish that are clearly affected by alterations to their migratory routes. Most of these same species, as well as other species in the rivers and reservoirs, also carry out migrations between habitats for feeding and refuge, but these migrations are quite varied and appear to be more or less opportunistic. Evidence for and interpretation of this distinction varies between the river basins and authors, and in the present book is seen most strikingly in Chapter 7 on the Colombian Amazon.

However, there are species of less direct economic value and/or smaller body size, such as forage fish, that are migratory too. For example, sardinhas (Pelota spp.) are reported to lead the reproductive migratory subienda in the Upper Amazon (see Chapter 7), fishermen in the Mogi Guaçu (Upper Paraná River Basin) speak of migratory species of the

² Lucas & Baras, 2001

lambari (Astyanax spp.) that lead the piracema in this river (unpublished). Small forage species leaving the flood-plain lagoons as they drain are the defining characteristic of the lufada phenomenon of the Brazilian Pantanal that coincides with the first stage of the reproductive migration of larger and economically important species. While these species are of obvious ecological importance, very little is known about them and they are not generally the targets of directed fisheries. They are not covered by most of the authors in this book.

Migratory Strategies: Endless Variety

There is a staggering variety of migratory species in Latin America, and their life histories are incredibly diverse. The characids have scales. Some, like the dourado Salminus, look salmon-like. The big catfish, the pimelodids particularly prized for their flesh, are smooth-skinned. The diets of the two groups range from mud to fruits to other fish to plankton, and the spawning journeys they embark on every year, when the rains come and the rivers overflow their banks into the wetlands and forests, are bewilderingly various. Some species go upstream to spawn, while some go downstream. Some spawn in headwaters above the flooded areas of the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, while others release their eggs in the rivers mainstem. A few have even managed to carry on reproducing despite the existence of numberless reservoirs that spatter the map of Brazil and testify to the colossal scale of hydroelectric development in the country. All of them, however, release their eggs to the currents, where they drift, and hatch, and feed with the rhythm of the rising and falling waters, coming and going from habitats that appear and disappear with the floods.

Readers of this book will be introduced to a group of fishes that has evolved a variety of strategies for using the transient habitats that result from the seasonal floods characteristic of the region. Floodplains and inundated forests are essential for larval and juvenile development of most of these species, and provide foraging opportunities once they have become adults. Most of the species depend absolutely on the cues associated with flooding, for it is these cues that trigger reproduction.

Migration is a spectacular phenomenon, with the shoals of adults heading upstream making a memorable picture. In larger rivers the system

is particularly complicated, with adults and juveniles travelling not only up and down the river mainstem, but also in and out of the tributaries and their associated floodplains. Some species travel more than 1000 km, at speeds up to 16 km per day.³ Migrations that go up and down river channels (both mainstem and tributaries) are usually called “longitudinal”, while “lateral” migrations are those between the channel and the floodplain – although local terminology sometimes complicates the picture further.

The migratory strategies themselves vary between species and river basins. If there can be said to be a general pattern for reproductive migrations, it is an upstream spawning migration (piracema or subienda), followed by a downstream dispersion of eggs, larvae and spent adults into floodplain areas. However, there are many variations on this theme, with the most complex situation being in the Amazon, where there can be at least three separate phases of migration, with adults migrating both up and downstream, for reproduction or for feeding, in tributaries and in the mainstem river. Another variant occurs in the Upper Uruguay, where floodplains are less common and juvenile development takes place in the transient environments found at the mouths of tributaries backed up by flooding of the main river channel (in Chapter 4 the terms “longitudinal” and “lateral” are even used differently from the usual convention). The passive downstream drift of larvae and juveniles is common to most migratory patterns in South America, in contrast to salmon in North America, for example, where fry control their own movement downstream in response to developmental and environmental cues.

If a river is large enough there may even be separate upriver and downriver populations of a single species, which makes unravelling their migration patterns that much more complicated. Even today, drawing a simple diagram of a migration pattern for a given species, in a given river system, is difficult, because such a diagram requires detailed information on movements and genetic makeup that is in most cases lacking. The descriptions of migratory patterns provided by each of the authors in this book represent the best knowledge currently available, but they will undoubtedly be refined in the years to come. The new tools of DNA fingerprinting (to distinguish between separate populations of the same species) and radio-tagging (to track fish movement) are only now

³ Welcomme, 1985

beginning to be applied in Brazil, and it is over the coming decade of research that we will finally be able to draw the migration maps so necessary for sustainable management. Such tools, and the picture of migration patterns they can provide, are doubly important when one considers the effects of changing flow patterns, water extraction, and damming. Different species react to obstacles differently; some of them can negotiate fish ladders, and others may be able to establish separate populations in the smaller sections of river available to them after a dam is erected, or even spawn in a reservoir. In the absence of good data on migration, the true effects of these alterations to habitat can only be guessed at.

Apart from general similarity of reproductive patterns, many of the most abundant characid migratory species, which represent up to 70% of the fish biomass in South American freshwaters, share a dietary dependence on detritus or the fruit and vegetation of terrestrial plants, with only larval phases relying on plankton. Carnivorous migratory characids and catfish in turn prey on these fish, transferring nutrients between habitats and relying on seasonal input from inundated terrestrial areas. All these migratory species share the unfortunate attribute of being very poorly understood – a point that is made time and again by the authors of this book.

Threats to Migratory Fishes

Like inland water biodiversity everywhere, the freshwater fishes of Brazil and Colombia are faced with a variety of threats. The migratory species, because of their wide-ranging habits, are probably the most vulnerable group of all, and the fact that these species provide food and income for local people makes their situation doubly significant.

Threats to migratory fishes in South America include industrial, domestic, and agricultural pollution, deforestation, alteration and obstruction of river flows, introduced species and overfishing. While all basins experience all of these threats, pollution is particularly severe in parts of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, damming is especially intense in the Upper Paraná and the São Francisco rivers (many of the rivers in South America are so heavily dammed as to have become a chain of reservoirs), and overfishing is evident in parts of the São Francisco, Paraná,

and Amazon systems. Gold mining causes heavy metal pollution in the Upper Paraguay and in the Colombian and Brazilian Amazon. Large-scale works including dredging and pipelines have the potential for widespread habitat damage in the Paraná-Paraguay region. Pollution from hog and poultry farming is a special problem on the Upper Uruguay, and the use of herbicides to eradicate illegal crops has serious consequences for fishes in the Colombian Amazon. Pollution has left the Piracicaba River, which drains into the Paraná, biologically depleted and in some sections devoid of aquatic life. Exotic species like the tucunaré, an Amazonian native introduced to the Paraná and Paraguay basins, may confer economic benefits (for example, as commercial and sport fish) but compete for habitat and food with several native migratory species. Riverside deforestation has the unexpected effect of eliminating a food source for species that live on fruits and seeds borne to them by the river. Even climate change is potentially disastrous because it affects the rhythm of the waters, and for species that live and die with the annual flood, water is everything. Migratory fish populations appear currently to be healthiest in portions of the Amazon and Upper Paraguay basins.

An idea of just how vulnerable the migratory species are can be gained from an analysis published by Froese and Torres (1999). These authors used the data in FishBase, a large database on finfish, to analyze the biological characteristics of threatened fish species contained in the 1996 IUCN Red List. The result is nothing less than a profile of the kind of fish most likely to become extinct. Here are the characteristics of the unlucky winner:

• Freshwater (ten times higher threat than to marine fish).
• Migrates to spawn or feed.
• Feeds at lower trophic levels.
• Large, slow-growing and late-maturing.
• Doesn’t guard its eggs.
• Occurs in countries with high population densities.
• Occurs in areas where there are many introduced fish species.

As a description of many of the migratory species of South America, the above list could hardly be improved on; for readers of this book, the following chapters will introduce species after species that fits the description.

Fisheries

Fisheries on South American migratory species are classified as subsistence, sport, and commercial. The latter are carried out primarily for domestic markets, with the only significant “industrialized” export fisheries being in the Amazon. Subsistence fisheries generally use simple gear. Fisheries vary in importance in different basins: the Amazon currently contributes 54% of all documented Brazilian freshwater fisheries production, including aquaculture. The industrialized Amazonian fishery is based on only a few catfish species, whereas the subsistence, artisanal and sport fisheries utilize many species in all basins. Sport fishing is especially important to the economy of the Pantanal in the Upper Paraguay, but is also significant, and growing, in most other locations. Subsistence and commercial artisanal fishing are also becoming increasingly important for riverine communities in most basins, as access to agricultural land and other sources of income decreases.

Depletion of fish stocks (not necessarily by overfishing) is leading to conflict between sport and artisanal fishing groups in all basins, a conflict that is closest to resolution in areas of the Amazon where community-based management is practised, and in the Lower Pantanal. Throughout the region, managers are having to confront the different needs of the commercial and sport groups, both of which have different requirements of the resource. Greater inclusion of stakeholders in management will help, and is starting to happen, but the need for better monitoring of stocks and catches will not go away.

This book makes the ambitious attempt to categorize and describe the several kinds of fisheries in each basin and on each major species. In so doing the authors, despite their location in the basins themselves, faced a daunting task. Although inland waters are now generally accepted to support a huge variety of small fisheries with enormous significance for local livelihoods, any analysis of these fisheries is presently crippled by the lack of good reporting and statistics. The basins are vast, the people who catch fish are strung out along mainstems and tributaries, central landing sites are the exception rather than the rule, and the most one can confidently say about catch statistics is that they’re underestimates. Whether this means the fisheries are over-extended or actually healthier than is now believed is anyone’s guess.

Management of fisheries in the absence of reliable statistics is like minding a store with no record of sales and no inventory. Coates (2002) has analyzed the situation in Asia, where under-reporting of inland fisheries is the rule. In the eight countries he reviewed for FAO, Coates found that inland capture fisheries were under-reported by factors ranging from four to as high as twenty-one. A similar analysis of fisheries statistics for South America and the implications for management is urgently needed. For now, all we have is warning flags such as Araujo-Lima and Ruffino’s note on catch reporting in the Brazilian Amazon (page 221), “the total catch from the Amazon may be as much as three times the values presented by IBAMA.” If, as we suspect, the same situation obtains in other basins, conservation and sustainable management of the migratory species in South America are presently being hobbled by the most basic of needs – the need for information.

Geographic Coverage and Aliases

The geographic coverage of South America by this book is not complete, and several major systems with important migratory species are excluded. The Orinoco River (Colombia and Venezuela), for example, like the Amazon arises on the eastern Andes and drains large tracts of rain forest and tropical savannahs before flowing into the Caribbean. Another major river not covered here, the Magdalena (Colombia), drains the moist central valleys of the northern Andes. The Parnaíba River (Brazil) drains arid lands and its relatively small discharge flows into the Atlantic between the Tocantins and the São Francisco rivers. The Essequibo River of Guyana is the largest of the three major rivers in Guyana. None of them are covered in this book. Several of them cross or form international boundaries, which leads to complicated issues of exploitation and conservation, especially when the river flow is altered. The Yacyreta Dam, a huge bilateral project on the Paraná River that is shared between Argentina and Paraguay, is a good example, as is the Itaipu Binacional on the border between Brazil and Paraguay.

Because this book is a collection of chapters, each one written by a different group of authorities, there is inevitably some overlap. Most obviously, many of the species occur in several or all of the six river basins.

Just how much overlap there is in species composition, and how many and varied are the aliases each goes by, can be seen at a glance in Appendix A. These tables show that their status, the threats they face, the kinds of fisheries on them and even their common names may be different in different places.

South America is just too big, and its geography and social ecology too varied, to allow a one-size-fits-all description of the life and times of pintado or tambaqui. Hence we have not only allowed repeated description of certain species, we in fact consider it one of the book’s strengths. This way, each chapter is as complete as the author can make it, and for readers whose interests go beyond a single river basin, encountering the same fish in two different places will be like running across an old friend and looking out for changes since the last meeting.

The reason so many species inhabit geographically separate basins, of course, relates to the prehistory of the continent. Because the Amazon River originally drained into the Pacific, then into the Caribbean (through the present-day Magdalena River), and then into the northern coast of South America (through the present-day Orinoco River), many of the fish species in the different river systems are the same.⁴ Present-day conditions developed from the rise of the Andes, starting about 89 million years ago. Studies of mitochondrial DNA, for example, suggest close genetic relationships between the Prochilodus species in the Paraná, Amazonas, Orinoco, and Magdalena basins.⁵ Since so many of the same species occur in different basins, and because so many basins cross national boundaries, it should be no surprise that certain migratory species pose unique management problems. The sábalos (Prochilodus spp.) and the large catfishes (for example, Pseudoplatystoma spp.), both of which migrate extensively, are prominent examples of this problem.

The Migratory Fishes as Examples of Freshwater Biodiversity

The contribution of inland waters to the global economy and local livelihoods is under-appreciated, and the migratory fish species are just

⁴ Lundberg et al., 1998

⁵ Sivasunder et al., 2001

one part of a complex web of inland biodiversity. Despite their relative insignificance in terms of area (less than 0.5% of the world’s water), inland waters contain 40% of all aquatic species. And, largely because of the “captive” geographic nature of inland waters that makes them so susceptible to habitat degradation, freshwater fish species by far outnumber marine ones on the current IUCN Red List (84% freshwater). Freshwater species face special risks, of which fishing is certainly not the greatest, yet they are less well known than marine ones. Those risks are not just the familiar ones of habitat loss and pollution – the impact of global warming on water levels will be profound, and for a group of species like the migratory fish whose biology is completely evolved around the ebb and flow of floodwaters, the implications are enormous.

One of the results of the shortage of information on global taxonomy is that it’s difficult to compare the numbers of migratory and non-migratory South American species. In the one basin where guesses have been hazarded, namely the Amazon, estimates hover around 3,000 fish species and would seem to relegate the forty-six migratory species described by Araujo-Lima and Ruffino (Chapter 6) to part of a distinct minority. Incomplete identification of species, and deficient fisheries landing statistics, make it impossible to be more precise in this or any other South American basin.

Of course, the South American species are not the only migratory fishes in the world. Although the patterns are often different from those seen in South America, migration is a prominent feature of the lives of a huge variety of fish species in other parts of the world, and the effects of damming and redirecting rivers have been especially singled out for study. A cursory look at some of these species (in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa) is provided in Appendix B. For species in South America, Africa and Asia the exhaustive review by Welcomme (1985) is highly recommended.

The Future

What is the future for the migratory fishes of South America? There is no simple answer, in large part because of the vast geographic area over which they are spread, and the great differences in status, use, and especially the

political and bureaucratic structure of local management systems. One certainty, however, is that the general lack of data is unlikely to change without better international awareness of these remarkable species. The migratory fish described in this book need to be promoted at home and on the world stage, in scientific meetings and in the popular media. As the profile of inland waters struggles upward, migratory fishes need to be more visible, and so do the communities that depend on them. Governments cannot be expected to push for research and management reforms for an obscure target. We hope this book will be the beginning of such an awareness.

The authors of each section offer their own detailed recommendations for conservation and management of the South American migratory fishes in their respective basins. Common elements of these recommendations are:

• Specifically and urgently address problems created by damming rivers, by regulating new development to ensure that floodplains remain accessible above reservoirs, improving fish passage, and developing water flow management protocols that re-instigate seasonal flooding patterns in downstream river sections. Several authors (although by no means all) recommend an improved stocking program for reservoirs in their area that includes monitoring of effectiveness and impacts;
• Reduce pollution, deforestation, floodplain destruction, and agricultural impact, including, in the case of Colombia, the use of herbicides to combat illicit agriculture. All authors felt that existing regulations could address many of the problems of environmental degradation, but that enforcement needs to be improved and that public education is an essential element in effecting that improvement.
• Improve knowledge of the migratory fish species, including better documentation of how they are affected by pollution, habitat loss, alterations of flow and overfishing;
• Implement fisheries management programs that accommodate the various interest groups in their development. In the Amazon, community-based management is recommended. Where a basin is shared between countries, as in the Paraná-Paraguay and Colombian

Amazon, authors stress the need for co-ordination amongst neighbouring countries. Both the Amazon authors and the Upper Paraná authors emphasize that agencies must consider more carefully the social implications of management regimes;

• Revise and implement broader biological survey and fisheries monitoring programs.

A Note on Usage

The authors use the terms “fisherman” and “fisher.” While men do most of the fishing in the areas described in this book, women are heavily involved in processing, maintenance and marketing (see for example Nordi’s first-hand description of fishing on the São Francisco River, page 175). The fact that most current dictionaries have no entry for “fisher,” and define “fisherman” as “a person who catches fish,” indicates how unsettled the terminology is, so we have elected to allow the individual authors their preferences.

REFERENCES

Coates, D. 2002. Inland capture fishery statistics of Southeast Asia: current status and information needs. Asia-Pacific Fishery Commission, Bangkok. RAP Publication No. 2002/11. 113 p.

Froese, R., and A. Torres. 1999. Fishes under threat: an analysis of the fishes in the 1996 IUCN Red List. In Pullin, R. S. V., D. M. Bartley and J. Kooiman (Eds.). Towards policies for conservation and sustainable use of aquatic genetic resources. ICLARM Conf. Proc., 59:131–144.

Kottelat, M., and T. Whitten. 1996. Freshwater biodiversity in Asia, with special reference to fish. World Bank Technical Paper No. 343. World Bank. ISBN: 0-8213- 3808-0

Lucas, M. C., and E. Baras. 2001. Migration of freshwater fishes. Blackwell Science Ltd, Oxford. 420 p.

Lundberg, J. G., L. G. Marshall, J. Guerrero, B. Horton, M. C. S. L. Malabarba, and F. Wesselingh. 1998. The stage for Neotropical fish diversification: a history of tropical South American rivers. In Malabarba, L. R., R. E. Reis, R. P. Vari, Z. M. S. Lucena, C. A. S. Lucena (Eds.). Phylogeny and classification of Neotropical fishes. EDIPUCRS, Porte Alegre, Brazil. 13–48 p.

Sivasundar, A., E. Bermingham, and G. Ortí. 2001. Population structure and biogeography of migratory freshwater fishes (Prochilodus: Characiformes) in major South American rivers. Molecular Ecology, 10:407–418.

Welcomme, R. L. 1985. River fisheries. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 262. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Rome.

Document(s) 3 de 11