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Arapaima — printable fact sheet
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Arapaima
Arapaima gigas
The arapaima is an air-breather that will drown if it cannot reach the surface: its swim bladder is lined with lung-like tissue and it must gulp air roughly every five to twenty minutes, an adaptation to the oxygen-starved, seasonally stagnant floodwaters of the Amazon. That sin…
Did you know?
- Despite living in water, arapaimas can actually drown if they are unable to surface regularly to breathe air.
- The very habit that made arapaima easy to overfish also made them easy to manage: because they must surface to breathe, Amazonian communities can count the population of a lake accurately by eye and set a sustainable quota, and community-managed lakes have seen arapaima numbers rise many times over. The tongue is a bony, rasp-like plate, historically dried and used as a grater for guarana. What is called "the" arapaima is really several species, some described only in the last two decades.
What I learned
Draw the arapaima
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