The Amazon rainforest continues to burn, and experts fear that it could spread and destroy the habitat of flooded forests where hundreds of fish species live.
PHOTO BY CARL DE SOUZA, AFP / GETTY IMAGES
Forest fires are a threat to species that depend on the flood season to survive.
MANAUS (AM) – This year, the serious fires in the Amazon not only attracted international attention, but also illuminated the effects of growing deforestation in the region, from the evaporation of rains to carbon dioxide emissions. However, a crucial effect of forest loss on the forest has been largely ignored: how it influences the river system and the fish that live in it.
There are few places in the world where aquatic and tree life are as close as they are in the Amazon. While the rainforest is home to the largest river in the world (by volume of water) and 1,700 tributaries, about a sixth of the basin is also comprised of swamps covered by the forest that are flooded annually for long periods and support the fish most important commercially in the region.
“This flood pulse is the driving force that governs all ecological functions and interactions along the river basin, and creates flooded forests that are crucial for the survival and reproduction of hundreds of fish species in the Amazon,” says Jansen Zuanon , biologist at the National Amazon Research Institute (Inpa), in Manaus.
Although still intact in much of the Amazon, alluvial forests have been heavily damaged in recent decades in some parts of the basin, especially in the plains of eastern Brazil. Now, the threat to their survival – and the fish that depend on them – may be becoming more intense because of growing deforestation and fires, say the researchers, warning that further degradation of swamp forests could fundamentally alter the Amazonian aquatic ecosystem.
“If you don’t protect these areas, the rivers will not be the same and we will lose the fish,” says Leandro Castello, a tropical ecologist at the Virginia Tech Global Change Center, who studied the links between the forest and fish in the Amazon.
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