Walter Delazari and I are fishing an igapó, a little floodplain lake off the Rio Negro in Amazonas, Brazil. My attention is riveted on an 8-foot caiman sunning itself nearby. The crocodilian looks back at me, hungrily.
“Pssst.” My Brazilian friend whistles softly to draw my attention, then motions for me to look beside us. Passing beneath the 10-foot boat, clearly visible in the coffee-colored water, is a fish much longer than the caiman — longer, even, than the boat. The leviathan swims slowly, 3 feet beneath the surface. Its head is near Walter, the fish’s tail trailing 12 feet or so behind. I am reminded at once of the huge alligator gars I have seen cruising big rivers back home in Arkansas. This fish has the same primitive look, like something from a book on dinosaurs. Scales the size of soda-can lids armor its massive bronze body. As the fish moves parallel to our craft, I see gigantic eyes staring up at us, and a huge upturned mouth.
I watch, astounded, as the fish surfaces beside me. It breaches like a whale, its enormous head rising clear of the water. Then, amazingly, the cavernous mouth opens — a mouth as big as a paint bucket — and the fish inhales. It sounds like a drowning giant gasping for air.
I am mesmerized. Walter sees this and furtively reaches out to touch the fish’s blood-red tail. When he does, the behemoth becomes a stick of dynamite with a short fuse. The water explodes. Walter and I are drenched by a tidal wave.
My friend from Saõ Paulo finds this very humorous. He tries to act innocent but can’t stifle a belly laugh. “Um gigante peixe, nao é?” he chatters loudly in Brazilian Portuguese, stretching his arms far apart. Then, remembering I speak little of his language, he asks again in English. “It was a giant fish, yes, Señor Catfish?”
“Sim,” I reply. Yes. “Que é isso?” I ask him to tell me what it was.
“Pirarucú,” he says, his arms still outstretched. “Enorme pirarucú!”
A huge pirarucú.
I pick apart the name. Pira is fish in the Tupi language; rucu from urucu perhaps, a fruit yielding a reddish dye used for body paint. “Red fish,” a reference, no doubt, to the creature’s crimson tail. I saw it as the fish sounded, a tail more vivid than the feathers of the scarlet macaws we see flying by, more fiery even than the tail of the pirarara, the beautiful red-tailed catfish that also swims in Amazonia.
As we settle back to fishing, Walter tells me about the pirarucú. It lives, he says, in shallow lakes. Its swim bladder forms a modified lung. Unlike most fish, it must breathe atmospheric oxygen to survive in the oxygen-poor waters. The pirarucú surfaces every few minutes, almost like a dolphin, to take a breath. Specialized teeth embedded in its bony tongue help it chew up the armor-plated catfish that compose much of its diet.
Brazilians consider the pirarucú among the most delectable food fish, but it cannot be easily enticed with lures or bait. The pirarucú is taken, instead, with nets, or with harpoons hand-forged from iron. Walter says the fishermen wait in a boat or on shore in narrow channels connecting river and lakes. And when the gargantuan fish rises to breathe, the fishermen strike like Nantucket whalers. The sharp barbed head of the harpoon lodges in the flesh and disengages from the harpoon’s wooden shaft. A stout line connecting the harpoon head to a boat or tree secures the fish. A frenzied battle ensues. Sometimes the fisherman wins, sometimes the fish.
The pirarucú (Arapaima gigas), also known as the arapaima or paiche, ranks among the largest of all scaled freshwater fish. Specimens exceeding 12 feet and 600 pounds have been reported. A 339.5-pound
specimen caught in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2010 is the rod-and-reel world record.
The fish’s large rough scales are used as sandpaper and nail files, and in making ornaments and souvenirs. Natives use its bony tongue as a grater and wood rasp. Sometimes the skin is cured to make shoes and bags. Its delicious flesh, however, has caused the fish’s decline throughout its range in the Amazon River basin.
Some call pirarucú “Brazilian codfish” because the fish are salted and sun-dried for preservation. Henry Walter Bates, a naturalist who visited the Amazon in the mid-1800s, said native families were employed four to five months each year to harpoon and salt-cure pirarucú that often were sold in larger communities. Because the fish were large, abundant and easily procured, they were the main wild food source for many jungle inhabitants.
Unfortunately, overfishing has depleted stocks of
pirarucú. Fish more than 5 feet long have become increasingly rare. International trade has been banned to help the species recover, and education efforts in Brazil, Guyana and other South American countries teach natives the benefits of regulated harvest. Trade within countries continues, however, and the pirarucú is still the most sought-after food fish in the region. The pirarucú’s future is uncertain.
Near the small village of Villa Floresta on the Rio Negro, I met an old Brazilian who showed me a very large pirarucú curing on a rack of branches behind his jungle hut. Each boneless fillet was 6 feet long and weighed approximately 100 pounds. A friend with me noted, quite appropriately, “Those must be the world’s biggest fish fillets.”
The old man harpooned the fish in a nearby lake and captured it only after a prolonged battle. The pirarucú fought valiantly, he said, pulling his dugout a great distance before tiring. When, after many hours, the battle had ended, the man tied the fish alongside his canoe. It took many more hours for him to paddle back home, and when he arrived, six men struggled to carry the leviathan up the steep riverbank to the hut. It was, the man said proudly, the largest pirarucú captured in this region in many, many years.
That night, aboard our mother ship, the Amazon Castaway, my friend João prepared fresh pirarucú for supper. The fillets were covered with herbs, spices and fresh vegetables and baked in the oven. Though full of tiny bones, the pirarucú was sweet and flavorful, some of the best fish I have ever eaten.
Unfortunately for these red-tailed giants, their delectable flesh may prove their
undoing. We can only hope the Brazilians find a way to save this incredible giant before it is too late.