The little pet fish that saved a town in the Amazon

A couple weeks ago, Planet Money produced Sir Luis Gio and I found ourselves on a dark, glassy river in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. We climbed into a small canoe, jump, jump, jump.

“After settling in a bit, you have to be in the middle, weight always in the middle.”

We headed up river. And we're off.

We were here to investigate a change that's been happening in the worldwide and multi-billion

dollar business of pretty little fish. You know, those tropical fish you often see at the pet store, the neon-colored ones, the ones that shimmer like sequins, some of them actually come from the wild. In fact, one of the world's most popular species of pet fish is caught right here in the Brazilian Amazon.

Our guide for the day is Valderiz Cicada, people call him Deco. Deco says, "Get ready for an adventurer and adventure to see what we can catch." Will you ask Deco just to tell us a little bit more about where we're going? We'll say Pogit Palar, on Giovamos. Our producer Luis, who speaks Portuguese, actually he speaks a lot of languages, was interpreted.

The river that we're on is called the Rio Negro, the Black River.

“It's one of the main tributaries of the Amazon.”

And for several months out of the year, the river level rises and floods the surrounding

rainforest, creating this dense tropical swamp. It's like we're in the middle of a forest, but the ground is water. Totally flooded. Deco steers us through a maze of grated waterways, deeper and deeper into the forest. Oh, wow.

Oh, a dead. I can't hold with the branches. So the Rio Negro is called this, because the water here is actually black. It looks like we're floating on a river of black tea, for Deco, who catches pretty a little fish for a living.

This unique water is the reason he has a job.

You see, the color comes from the plants of the jungle.

Because their leaves and bark soak in the river, they release chemicals called tannins that stain the water.

“It is literally a kind of rainforest tea.”

And just like regular tea, the water here is acidic. It's slightly sour. So the fish that you find here, they are adapted to this weird water. This is where they reproduce. And for a long time, the Amazon was the only place where they reproduced.

Eventually we reach a quiet darker part of the forest. Deco leans overboard and he starts flicking the water with his fingers. He tells us that is how you attract the fish. Deco is in his fifties. He's tan and compact with big bear paw hands as in it.

He dips his net into the water and when he lifts it out, oh, there they are. They're about a dozen of these little fish, like little squirming eyebrows. Oh, they're jumping around. These ones have electric blue spots on their heads. He scoops them into a big plastic tub.

So how much would one of these fish cost? Deco says in Brazil you might pay about two Brazilian reacts. That's about 40 cents. Out of that, he gets paid a few cents. Which for a single fish is not a lot, but the river is teeming with these and all kinds

of pretty little fish that you can sell. On a good day, Deco says he can collect 10,000 of them, filling up tub after tub. Over the last few decades, people here have taken hundreds of millions of tropical fish from these flooded forests, selling them to aquariums and pet stores all over the world. These fish have been the main economic lifeline for most people in this remote part of Brazil.

You'll come to see Pesca con catosion. Deco told us he started working as a fisherman when he was 14 years old. And now they have seen plenty of quattro, but he's 54. Thanks to these tiny fish Deco has been able to raise five kids in the multi-school. He's proud of that.

But Deco told us he's not sure how much longer he'll be able to keep doing this job. He said he's afraid eventually this job won't even exist anymore. Because orders for these fish are way, way down. Market for pretty little fish from this part of the Amazon is drying up. And that is the reason we're here to understand how that happened.

And how some folks in this little town are trying to fight back. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jeff Quow. Today on the show, we are in Brazil on a mission to trace an unusual supply chain. At next, this remote town in the Amazon to pet stores all over the world.

But because the fish are disappearing, this is not one of those stories. No, this problem is an age-old business problem. The fishermen and women of the Rio Negro are facing competition, a warming competition. From thousands of miles away.

We first met our fishermen Deco in a town called Barcelos.

There are no roads that lead to Barcelos. It's a few dozen streets scrammed along the banks of the Rio Negro, between the river and the rainforest. There's an air strip, a floating gas station, and a big blue and white church. In Brazil, Barcelos is known as the capital of ornamental fish.

Here we are. At one point, 80% of the economy here depended on the aquarium fish trade.

“These fish are so important that every year, this tiny town celebrates them with a humongous”

festival. It's called the festival of the ornamental fish. We've been told that this thing is so spectacular that we have to see it for ourselves. When we arrive, the full town is getting ready. It's standing hot.

All along the main strip, we see fish signs and streamers hanging off the ramp posts. Like you know something's about to happen. In the town square, there's a ten-foot statue of Jesus. The pedestal that he's standing on is covered in fish art. There's actually a specific fish that we keep seeing over and over again.

This fish is on that. Jesus statue, it's on all the banners around town. Oh my God, everyone's wearing t-shirts with this fish on it. This fish, it is called the Cardinal Tetra. This is the one that Deco spends most of his time trying to collect.

“It is bright blue with a neon red stripe down the bell.”

It's like a little iridescent sunflower seed. There were some on display in the tanks near the town square. There they are. The Cardinal Tetra is one of the most popular aquarium fish in the world. From the sunlight they glow.

Yeah. You have almost certainly seen a Cardinal Tetra at some point in your life. And the person who first told us about the Cardinal Tetra and this town and this festival is a guy who has been doing everything he can to keep fishermen like Deco in business. His name is Scott Dabd.

We met him by the Docks near the church. Hi, it's great to finally meet you in person. Scott is a conservation biologist. He used to work at the New England Aquarium. And the first time he came to Barcelona back in the 90s, he wasn't worried about the fishing

industry. He was worried about the fish.

“He told us that at one point, Barcelona was almost single, handedly supplying the global”

demand for Cardinal Tetra. So he and his colleagues were trying to figure out just how many Cardinals the locals were collecting every year.

And if that was sustainable we concluded that there were at least 20 million Cardinal Tetra

is taken every year from this region and that sounds like a lot. But is that a lot? Yeah, 20 million is how wicked a lot as we say in Boston. And that was just the fish that they could count. Scott estimated that the total number could even be double that, 40 million fish every

year. And at that point, I got a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach. And I felt this has got to be too much. But then as they started to study this part of the Amazon, they discovered two things. First that there were a lot of Cardinal Tetra in these waters.

So many that even 40 million was just a drop in the bucket. They also learned that most of these Cardinal Tetra are doomed to live very short lives. Every year there's a dry season, the river level goes down, and millions of them die. So Scott and his colleagues started to think that collecting these Cardinal Tetra was maybe more than just sustainable, it might actually be good for the Amazon and for the people

of Barcellos. Because if the locals could make a living collecting these fish, who would otherwise die, then they wouldn't be doing destructive things to the Amazon. Like, I don't know, burning it down to make room for cattle, which is a real thing that happens.

And members going to a big fish conservation conference to announce these findings. And I was quite nervous to take this podium. Here I was about to tell these people that have fish named after them. They've written the textbooks that I grew up on.

I was about to tell them that I was advocating for the extraction of potentially 40 million

individual freshwater fish every year, and it's a good thing. Usually conservation biologists, they are trying to advocate for the opposite, for keeping animals in nature. So this was like telling a bunch of dentists, "Hey, here is a type of candy that is actually

I was prepared at that podium to be pelted with fruit and shoes.

But he wasn't.

“His fellow conservation biologists looked at his data and believed what he was saying, that”

the Cardinal Tetra industry was helping and not hurting the environment. I was almost in tears. I was shocked. So Scott kept coming back to Barcellos, year after year, getting closer and closer with the fishermen and fishermen, watching this annual festival get bigger and bigger.

Just this explosion of joy and happiness and celebration for these little fish and the impact they've had on this community. Scott told us, "It's hard to understand until you see this festival."

"The main event takes place inside this incongruously barge stake."

"Should we end here today?" "Yeah, let's take a look inside." "Yeah." When Luis and I arrived, there is an announcer counting down to the start of the show. "Sidigo Midemotors!"

Five minutes to go. "This is popping." This stadium is called the Pia Bojima.

“Here in Barcellos, Piaba is the word for "middle fish."”

So this gleaming white multi-story Piaba drone is literally a stadium dedicated to the little fish. 3 minutes to go.

Up in the box seats, we meet the mayor, as well as Ms. Barcellos.

"It's a belly." "It's a belly." It was wearing this glittering dress and sash. She told us her grandfather was a cardinal tetraficient. And then we are seconds away.

The dramatic music, the countdown, 37 seconds, 36, 34. And the show is... "Fail on our seas, and we're on our seas." A man steps out in an enormous, feathered head dress, and he's welcoming everybody to Barcellos.

“"The place where the cardinal is the king."”

And then the dancers come out, dozens and dozens of them, and sequence costumes, doing all kinds of complicated choreography. The whole crowd is singing along, we are cardinals, we are cardinals, then the five-story crane is pulled out. And there is a belly, you know, Ms. Barcellos.

She's wearing a tiara, and descending in a basket, covered in pink butterflies. And then she's holding this bedazzled, oversized cardinal tetra, and dancing. And okay, we are not going to describe this whole event for you, because, well, this went on for more than five hours straight. No joke.

The remoteable costume changes, they brought in parade floats. We saw a fully motorized cardinal tetra at the size of a houseboat. Some of these floats even had fireworks shooting out of them. This was better than any Super Bowl halftime shows you have ever seen. But the whole time we were there, there was this one thought that kept bothering me.

Because here was all this hullabaloo about these fish, about the cardinal tetra, about a business that we knew was in trouble. The next day, when we talked to some actual fishermen and fishermen, they were telling us a much less optimistic story, about Barcellos, and about the cardinal tetra. Scott introduced us to one of them.

Her name is R.R. Mara Castro, Mara, for short. And thank you, for our work, for the tip of a piabera guerrera. Mara calls herself a proud piabera warrior, piabera is the local word for someone who collects these little fish, these little piabas. And a lot of the local piaberas in piaberos, books like Deco, they bring their fish to Mara.

She and her husband are kind of like fish brokers, they've sort the fish and send them down river to the exporters who in turn put the fish on planes and send them all around the world. She said, if only you could see the port back then, all these boats would come in, these beautiful little white boats with fishing nets on top, the fishing nets of the piaberas.

And there used to be hundreds of them out there fishing, Mara said. But then something happened that would turn Mara and Deco in Scott's world completely upside down. It was the year 2000, Scott was back in his office at the New England Aquarium, just flipping

But this wasn't a wild cardinal tetra from the Amazon.

“So this was a farmed cardinal, from Florida.”

You see, even though most Aquarium fish are farmed, cardinal tetra has come from very unusual water. It wasn't easy to produce these fish on fish farms. But now you had this article celebrating how fish breeders in Florida had cracked the code.

Scott felt sick. I actually scanned that page to show the fishers on his next trip to Barcelona, Scott delivered the news. There were gasps and it was quite an eye opener. Everybody knew what this meant.

The people of the Amazon no longer had them monopoly on this popular pet fish. Competition was coming and Scott says there is no way to overstate just how big of a deal this was.

The world changed for me and the world changed for Barcelo's and it changed for the whole

forest. Everything changed. Now it didn't change all at once. But slowly these farmed cardinals started making their way onto the market. By the late 2000s, demand for cardinal tetra's from their natural habitat in the Amazon

was plummeting. Martin told us she saw a lot of her fellow Piaberos and Piaberas giving up. Wonder if she should give up too. I think it's expected. And when David had been with him, he said, "I have to talk to him now, and he won't

do it." So she was desperate. She was like, "Yeah, like what are we going to do?"

But you know, Mara calls herself a Piabera warrior.

So there was only one choice. She was going to stay in the business, stay and fight. And Scott was going to help. He's known Mara and her family since she was a little kid. We thought.

Okay. It's game on. We have to compete and we have to win.

“What do we have to do to make Barcellos cardinal tetras?”

The most lucrative, the most attractive to everybody in the supply chain. Scott now runs a nonprofit called Project Piaber, which is a bunch of volunteers in the U.S. and Brazil trying to keep this cardinal tetra industry alive in Barcellos. We've told us the number of Piaberos and Piaberas has gone from hundreds to only about 30 nowadays who are still actively fishing.

And what they're up against are these vast fish farms in Singapore and Vietnam and Malaysia who have all figured out not only how to breed these cardinal tetras in captivity, but how to do it on an industrial scale. And look at this way. These Piaberas and Piaberas face a classic business problem.

Someone has come out with a competing product and is eating their lunch. So what do they do? Well, if this was a business school case study, this is where the professor would ask what are your competitive advantages. And what are your competitive disadvantages?

One disadvantage for the wild cardinals is that they come from this unusual water. So they sometimes struggle to adapt to life in an aquarium. So now Scott's been working with other scientists to design this special regimen to help wild cut cardinals get used to life in captivity before they get sold. We prepare them for their life in aquariums.

They receive the best fish food in the world. We also acclimate them for P.H. So what I'm imagining is this fancy pants finishing school for fish. Exactly. Another disadvantage is that there's a lot of red tape in Brazil.

So it can take weeks to get these fish out of the country. Mar and Scott have been lobbying the government to speed things up. But Scott's major project recently is to try to promote what he sees as the wild cardinal tetra's greatest advantage over their farm cousins, which is that these fish are wild. They have a story.

So Scott's been working on a way for potential customers to trace exactly where their wild cardinals were caught. And to learn about the P.H.Bero or P.H.Bero who caught them. Maybe even watch a video of the festival. We're giving them access to the story of where their fish came from.

The people that caught their fish, the impact that has had on the lives of these rural Amazonians. So it's kind of like the photo of the farmer that you see on the side of your fair trade coffee bag.

“Do you really think you can bring this big business back?”

I don't know. I can't stop trying now. Now there is a version of this story that ends right here, with a big question mark about the future of this little town that depends so much on this tiny little fish. But while we were in Barcelona, we also learned about this other fish, a much bigger fish.

The reasons we came all the way to Barcelona is to try and understand what happens in a town

“where the main industry, the industry that most people depend on, is fading away.”

And when we were out there and the flooded forests with Deco, he told us this story about the town's history, a story that started to put everything that was happening to the P.H.Bero's and to Barcelona's into perspective. It was late in the morning. We had spent hours with Deco, watching him flip the water to attract a little fish.

He told us about the good old days. When the Chancatoz is a kid, he says, "Set Chana Pudeye" back when he was a teenager, being a fisherman was just what everybody did. It was a good living. It was a good living.

It was a good living. It was a good living. He told us he would drink a lot and have a fine when it wasn't planned for the future. He said, "Maybe we thought that things would just keep getting better and better." But then it ended.

“We'd gotten to a place on the water where it felt like the trees were closing in on us.”

Deco was using a red paddle to stir us past the logs floating in the water and from time to time, he'd snap off a branch from a nearby sapling to mark which path we'd taken. And that is when Deco told us a story about his parents. Because his parents were not P.H.Bero's. Back then, the main industry in Barcelona was something else.

He told us that his parents worked in the rubber industry. Latex. Everybody worked in the rubber industry. Before the town was known as the capital of ornamental fish, it was known for its rubber. Rubber trees come from the Amazon.

And Barcelona was part of the huge Amazonian rubber boom in the early 1900s. But by the time Deco was growing up in the '70s, that industry had long been fading away. What happened to their jobs? Sospice de Balaman, Abbaasha, Okakont de Selconis.

“Okakont de Selconis, I don't know, because I've never heard of it.”

I've never heard of it before.

Dibasele is in Tomparo. So the demand for rubber stopped, so the jobs ended. Deco told us nobody could pay their bills. Everyone owed money. Everyone went under.

And the reason the world stopped buying their rubber, it was competition. Furners had taken this valuable tree from the Amazon and figured out how to grow it in other places. They set up huge rubber plantations in Southeast Asia. Nowadays the biggest producers of natural rubber are Thailand and Indonesia and Vietnam.

Deco said after they planted the trees over there, the world didn't need to buy rubber from Barcelona anymore. So people started to move away. Whole towns were disappearing. As a kid, Deco himself wasn't sure if he'd be able to stay in Barcelona.

Except there was this little fish, the cardinal tetra. Some explorers had come through in the 1950s and noticed that it was prettier than any little tetra the world had ever seen. And so, the gears of a new economy started turning. The cardinal tetra essentially saved the town of Barcelona.

But now, competition has come for these cardinal tetras and it's almost like the exact same story all over again. In fact, these farmed fish even come from the same countries that planted all the rubber trees like Indonesia and Vietnam. Here is a pattern here, right?

First, the world notices that the people of the Amazon have something unique and valuable,

like a special tree or a pretty little fish or other stuff like that tasty treat. We call a cacao. But eventually the rest of the world figures out how to take the Amazon out of the equation, how to take people like Deco out of the equation. We asked Deco if he thought maybe this time could be different.

If this plan with Scott and Maura and the rest of the Piaberos could stop the ornamental fish industry from disappearing here. He said, of course, he hopes so, but then he mentioned something else, something that completely changed how I thought about this whole situation. Something that showed me just how quickly the economy of this town has been evolving on

its own. [speaking in foreign language] Deco said, yeah, my intention is to keep working with the Cardinal Tetris, but hey,

there's always sport fishing, right?

So it's, is, is do some ornamental fishing, but also make ends meet with sports fishing. So that is when we learned that Deco himself is not a full-time Piabero, not anymore.

And he told us, yeah, a lot of former Piaberos now work as fishing guides.

[speaking in foreign language] Yeah, so a lot of them have gone into sports fishing. [speaking in foreign language] Yeah, they work as guides, and also some people work as showfers, or hotel workers, or cleaners, you know, to cater to all the tourists who are coming in.

And as he said this, a lot of things we saw in town started to make a little bit more sense.

“Coming here, I think I've been so focused on the story of the Cardinal Tetra, the story”

of Scott and the Piaberos, and what this all meant for the future of Barcellos.

But all along, there had been these clues that I hadn't really been paying attention

to, clues about this other future for Barcellos. For instance, the hotel that we were staying at, the hotel Amazonita, it was pretty new looking. It didn't seem like the kind of hotel you would build in a town where the economy is collapsing. This hotel also had a pizza restaurant, which seemed a little weird, and at lunch, it filled up with loud dudes wearing wraparound sunglasses.

Some of them were carrying long, black equipment cases, which now in retrospect probably contained fishing rods. And you know that statue of Jesus in the town square, the one decorated with all the fish?

“Well, it wasn't just the Cardinal Tetra on there, actually.”

There was also this other fish.

It's green with black stripes and red fins, and in real life, it is about 36 times bigger than the Cardinal. This fish is called the peacock bass. It is a trophy fish. And these days, there are a lot of people talking about how Barcellos is the perfect place

to catch one. There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube.

There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube.

There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube.

There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube.

There are all these videos on YouTube.

“I think this sport-fishing industry had gotten here and how much it was changing the local economy, creating other kinds of opportunities.”

There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube. There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube.

There are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube, there are all these videos on YouTube. I realized one reason why tourism is such a popular economic strategy because tourism is the one industry that can't be picked up and moved away. If people want to enjoy a beautiful day out on the Rio Negro, they have to come here. And tourism is also kind of a blast ditch economic strategy, right? It's what is left after everything else has been outsourced or offshore or outcompeted.

And for Mara, our PiaBera Warrior, it's kind of sad.

You're out there and you're a little canoe, you're not getting yelled at by tourists, you're working for yourself.

Mara told us she wishes that the town would put more time and money into helping the PiaBera. As much time and money as it does, putting on the big festival every year that supposedly celebrates the PiaBera. And it's not all just about the festival and I had been thinking about that a lot too. Like how is it that the number of PiaBera is dwindling but this festival just keeps getting bigger and bigger every year.

“And I think the only way to make sense of it is that this festival is about more than just the PiaBera's.”

It's about nostalgia and heritage and cultural memory.

And also probably it is about boosting this new tourism economy because these days to survive in our cut-throat global economy. You gotta play to your strengths to your competitive advantages. And what the people of Barcellos have above all is a story. A story about how the town was saved by a tiny little blue and red fish.

“It's a pretty good story, even if that blue and red fish might not be its savior anymore.”

By the way, Mara wasn't able to get into the stadium for the festival this year. She says there were just too many people. But there was a big screen set up in the Plaza with plastic chairs. So she just watched the show from there. Okay, I want to tell you how excited I am to see you all in person on our book tour.

“I'm going to be in DC on April 8th and Boston on April 9th.”

We're going to do a fun little experiment to see which audience is, let's just say, "Wiser." The book is called Planet Money, a Guide to the Economic Forces that shape your life and we're coming to a dozen cities. Every stop will be unique with different hosts and guests. And if you get a ticket, you can also get a tour exclusive tote bag with your purchase, while supplies last. I'm supposed to say that I guess.

Anyway, find the show nearest to you in the link in the show notes or go to PlanetMoneyBook.com.

And thank you. This episode of PlanetMoney was co-reported and produced by the amazing Luis Gio, who's edited by Mary and McHune.

That checked by Sarah Huadez and engineered by Quacie Lee. Outskilled Mark is PlanetMoney's Executive Producer. We special thanks to Carrie Con and Dalton Margillo from NPR's Rio Bureau, Joey Ana Motta, Jackie Anderson, Fernando Brestlaw, and Sharon Dual. I'm Jeff Woe, this is NPR. Thanks for listening.