![]() ![]() The idea is to control or maybe even eradicate the fish by deliberately overfishing it, but Salazar, who profits handsomely from the paiche’s lean, white meat, says that would be impossible. Conservation-minded chefs in the cities promote paiche as a sustainable choice, which is true at face value: The fish is a nuisance, and other edible river fishes are disappearing. In the past decade paiche meat has also become more popular among city dwellers. Others, they say, have disappeared entirely. Fishermen who have worked these waters for years say the native species they prefer to eat-particularly giant Amazon catfish such as surubí, bagre and pintado-have become scarce. There are no official data yet on its impact, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of environmental damage. Since then, the paiche has spread across more than 45,000 square miles, roughly a quarter of the Bolivian Amazon. By the time Bolivian fishermen noticed the strange creature, it was already established in the oxbow lakes and seasonal lagoons that dot the forest. ![]() A few years later a flood washed juveniles out of a Peruvian fish farm near the border into Bolivia’s watershed. And it did enter Bolivia from Peru, where it had been added to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species index in 1975 as a species prone to extinction if trade was not closely controlled. The paiche is carnivorous-although it eats other fishes, not humans. People said it was created by nefarious Peruvian scientists, that they fed it with the blood of farm animals, that it wasn’t a fish at all but a monster. As it migrated upriver, rumors traveled with it. Native to the jungles of Peru and Brazil, it first appeared in nets in Bolivia’s Amazon Basin in the early 1990s. The paiche, or Arapaima gigas, is the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish. Las Peñitas, Bolivia-Before he had ever seen a paiche, fish trader Eric Salazar had heard the giant Amazon fish could grow up to 10 feet long, weigh 400 pounds and eat a man whole. ![]()
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