Fish and forests of Amazon

There are few places in the world where the aquatic and arboreal lives share a symbiotic relation. The Amazon river basin is one of them. While the rainforest is home to the world’s largest river (by volume of water) and 1,700 tributaries, about one-sixth of the basin is also made up of largely forest-covered wetlands that flood for long periods each year and support the commercially most important fish in the region.There are more than 3000 fish species in the Amazon, with at least hundreds more yet to be discovered. The biodiversity is attributed in large part to the flooding that occurs roughly from December to April. During that time water levels rise by as much as 50 feet, with water spilling over from the rivers to create new water- bodies in the forested areas. In a recent study published in 2017, Castelloet.al., with the help of 12 years of fisheries data gleaned from satellite images of forest cover in a wide area of the lower Amazon River,established a strong correlation between loss of forest and decrease in number of fish. The study observed that with deforestation, there was a significant decrease in the fish yield of Amazon in recent years.Significant links between forest cover and fish abundance were found for many of the Amazon’s most popular food fish, including the highly prized tambaqui, which can grow up to 70 pounds and has unique teeth that can crush and grind hard fruits and nuts.  Evidences are there that carnivorous species, such as the dourada catfish and surubim, which feed on schools of fish, also thrive on the flooded forest.In turn, those forests, which have adapted to survive being submerged under water for months at a time, also benefit from fish dispersing seeds throughout the system. Climate change and deforestation have made droughts common in the Amazon basin thus posing a tremendous danger to the fish populations there. The recent raging fires further add to the increasing threat to the marine life.