A river ’s pulse: Indigenous people and scientists unite to track giant dam’s environmental toll

This story was produced with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. Soon after sunrise one warm day in September 2022, 26-year-old Josiel Pereira Juruna boards a small motorboat and sets out on the emerald-green waters of the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon. Accompanying him are biologist Cristiane Carneiro and Pedrinho Viana, a fellow fisherman from their village of Muratu in the Paquiçamba Indigenous Reserve in northern Brazil’s Pará state. After a short ride, Viana hauls in a gillnet set out in a creek the night before. He pulls a disk-shaped fish with bright gray scales and a yellowish belly from the net and hands it to Josiel, who hangs it from a portable scale. “One hundred and fifty grams,” he declares, then presses a ruler against the animal, known as a big-eyed pacu. “Fifteen centimeters,” he says, as Carneiro takes notes. It’s a ritual of weighing and measuring that Josiel has performed nearly daily for the past 3 years to monitor the river’s fish stocks. Of all fish in this stretch of the Xingu, the seven species of pacu are the most important for his community, the Juruna, who rely on fishing for food and income. Known as vegetarian piranhas, pacu can reach up to 1 meter long. But they are dwindling. In November and December 2014, the best fishing months of that year, fishermen in Muratu caught a total of 770 kilograms of pacu. Over the same months in 2021, that number dropped t...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news