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    Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish Are Saving the World's Largest Rainforest
    Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish Are Saving the World's Largest Rainforest
    Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish Are Saving the World's Largest Rainforest
    Ebook127 pages51 minutes

    Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish Are Saving the World's Largest Rainforest

    By Sy Montgomery

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Considered the “lungs of the world,” the Amazon provides a full fifth of the world’s oxygen, and every year unsustainable human practices destroy 2.7 million acres. What can be done to help? That’s where Project Piaba comes in.
          Join the award-winning author Sy Montgomery and the photographer Keith Ellenbogen as they traverse the river and rainforest to discover how tiny fish, called piabas, can help preserve the Amazon, its animals, and the rich legacy of its people. Amazon Adventure is an eye-opening—and ultimately hopeful—exploration of how humanity’s practices are affecting and shaping not only the Amazon, but our entire environment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 4, 2017
    ISBN9781328694980
    Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish Are Saving the World's Largest Rainforest
    Author

    Sy Montgomery

    Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, adventurer, and author of more than thirty acclaimed books of nonfiction for adults and children, including The Hummingbirds’ Gift, The Hawk’s Way, the National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus, and most recently, Of Time and Turtles, which was a New York Times bestseller. The recipient of numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the Humane Society and the New England Booksellers Association, she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Howard Mansfield, and a border collie.

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      Book preview

      Amazon Adventure - Sy Montgomery

      FOR DR. MILLMOSS, IN MEMORY OF SALLY —S.M.

      TO MY NIECE, MAYA, WHOSE LOVE OF NATURE IS BOUNDLESS —K.E.

      Text copyright © 2017 by Sy Montgomery

      Photographs copyright © 2017 by Keith Ellenbogen

      except on pages 16 and 17, which are © Charles Doughty

      Map and fish spot illustrations © Sarah Green

      All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

      www.hmhco.com

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

      ISBN 978-0-544-35299-5

      eISBN 978-1-328-69498-0

      v1.0617

      Chapter 1

      Little Fish, Giant Jungle

      The crowns of drowned trees form islands along the river margins.

      It’s the planet’s richest ecosystem, where a butterfly’s wing can grow as big as your hand and five hundred species, from frogs to insects, can be found on a single flower. The Amazon basin—the 2,670,000 square miles drained by the Amazon River and its many tributaries—is the world’s largest jungle, an area as big as the lower forty-eight U.S. states, the same size of the face of the full moon. Jaguars hunt in the shade of two-hundred-foot-tall trees; pink dolphins, who the local people claim have magic powers, swim in the rivers. New species discovered here in the last decade include a tarantula striped like a tiger, a bald parrot, a vegetarian piranha, and a monkey who purrs like a kitten.

      The MV Iracema, one of two riverboats carrying the Project Piaba team on its adventure.

      This huge, ancient rainforest is essential to the planet. Because its trees provide a full fifth of the world’s oxygen, it’s considered the lungs of the world. Yet it all could vanish—and soon. Each year, mining, clear-cutting, burning, and cattle ranching destroy an area of Amazon forest twice the size of the city of Los Angeles.

      Luckily, beneath the glassy surface of its rivers live dozens of species of tiny, beautiful fish whose powers may be even greater than those of the mysterious pink dolphin or the mighty jaguar. These shy fish—so small the locals call them all piaba (pee-AH-bah), which roughly translates to small fry or pip-squeak—just might be able to save the Amazon.

      How? We’re on our way to find out.

      We’re traveling by riverboat from the port of Manaus up Brazil’s Río Negro, one of the two main arteries that join to form the Amazon River. Our destination, 307 miles to the north, is Barcelos, a town of twenty-five thousand. Each year, fishermen come here from miles around, bringing some forty million of these small, colorful tropical fish that they caught in their forest communities. From Barcelos, the fish will be shipped to Manaus, and from there to public and home aquarium tanks around the world.

      A pair of blue and gold macaws.

      But wait: Capturing and exporting wild animals from their natural habitat sounds like a terrible idea—doesn’t it?

      Our host, Scott Dowd, agrees. "That’s exactly what I thought when I first came here," he explains from aboard the deck of our boat, the MV Dorinha. A big man with a silvery beard and twinkling blue eyes, Scott knows better now. Today he eagerly admits, I couldn’t have been more wrong!

      Scott vividly recalls his first trip up the Río Negro. It was 1991. He was twenty-four years old, and he had teamed up with a prominent professor from the Federal University of Amazonas in Brazil, Dr. Ning Labbish Chao, to charter a boat with ten other fish enthusiasts. Thrilled to be in the green heart of the rainforest, Scott loved watching red and yellow macaws streak across the sky; he loved sleeping in a hammock on the boat at night and waking to the growling roars of howler monkeys in the morning. But mainly he came for the fish.

      Today he is senior aquarist with the New England Aquarium in Boston, in charge of twelve thousand fish, frogs, snakes, and turtles in its Freshwater Gallery. He’s always been, as he puts it, a fish nerd. He started keeping fish tanks before he was ten. And, like just about any kid who keeps a freshwater fish tank, many of his first pet fish were species native to the tea-colored waters of the Río Negro.

      Scott Dowd, at home in the dark waters of the Rio Negro.

      An adult dwarf pike cichlid.

      The river water here is stained dark from tannins—natural chemicals that come from plants whose leaves fall into these pure waters. The tannins make the water acidic. The waters are pristine—but it’s a hard place to make a living if you’re a fish, Scott says. Adaptation to the difficult conditions here has sculpted beautiful and bizarre fish such as cardinal tetras, who glow in the dark with neon stripes of electric red and hyacinth blue; marbled hatchetfish, who can fly out of the water to escape predators; and splash tetras, who spawn on the wet undersides of overhanging tree leaves to keep their eggs safe (the male lurks below in the water for days and uses his fins to throw water up at the eggs to keep them moist). Scott could not wait to visit Barcelos, the town from which so many of the fish he had kept as a child and tended at the New England Aquarium had been shipped.

      The river’s glassy surface reflects the trees and the sky.

      But when his

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