'Nothing really there that's inhibiting their growth': Sask. research student catches photo of 200-pound fish

A University of Saskatchewan research student recently captured a remarkable photo of fishers in the Amazon with a boatload of 200-pound Arapaima fish.

Toxicology doctoral student Alex Pelletier said he captured the photo one morning while on a research trip to Rio Juruá.

Pelletier told CTV News he had just woken up when he saw the fishing boat next to his research boat.

“I think there were at least 12 of them in that boat, each of them weighing more than 200 pounds. That was all just from one night of fishing. One crew of fishermen went out and caught all those fish to bring back to the main boat where they would be filleted and processed and packaged up and getting ready to ship out to places for commercial sale,” he said.

He said that many communities in the area don’t manage the fish populations properly and to see a boat with so many large fishes was unusual.

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“These fish are really important commercially for these villages because these villages will catch these fish and eat them themselves and bring them back to their communities for everyone to eat,” he explained.

Fishermen would also ship them to Manaus, Brazil for sale, which was how many of the smaller communities make money, Pelletier said.

“What's unique about the communities that live along the banks of the Sherlock River, is that these communities go through a lot of effort to keep track of how many of these fish are present in the river and in the lakes alongside the river, and how many that they catch every week or every month or every year.”

Fishermen from the area would travel to other villages and find out how many fish were being caught and how large they were, he said.

“So that way they know that they're not overfishing these Arapaima populations so that in future years, they can continue to have big harvests of Arapaima.”

Part of his work is to study food web structures and how elements like mercury and zinc travel through the food web and he said the Arapaima have lots of food in the area.

“A typical adult of these fishes are about 200 pounds or a little over 200 pounds, say like 100 kilograms. It'll only take between three to five years to get that big,” Pelletier said. “A lot of those fish in that picture are probably not even that old, but it's just because there's so much food for them to eat, and it's so warm all year round that they can just grow and grow and, and eat and eat. There's nothing really there that's inhibiting their growth.”

The Arapaima diet is mostly fish but it can also eat fruit, seeds, insects, birds and mammals on the surface of the water, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute.

It can also survive for 24 hours out of the water as it has the ability to breathe air, the website says.