AILSA CHANG, HOST:
So do you ever wonder where the fish at the pet store actually come from? Well, recently, our colleagues on the Planet Money podcast traced the journey behind one of the most popular aquarium fish in the world. Here's Jeff Guo.
JEFF GUO, BYLINE: This fish - it is a tiny little thing. It's silvery blue with a bright red stripe. It's called the cardinal tetra. And you've almost certainly seen one in real life. It's sold everywhere, but it originally comes from the Amazon.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLANKING)
GUO: A few months ago, we set out in a canoe across a dark, glassy river headed deep into the jungles of Brazil.
VALDERAS SIQUEIRA: (Non-English language spoken).
GUO: That's Valderas Siqueira (ph). He's a local fisherman. And he's saying, we're going on an aventura - an adventure - to see what we can catch. For more than an hour, he steers us through the dense tropical swamp, past the ferns and the floating logs and the trees dripping with vines. Eventually, we find our fishing spot, and Siqueira leans over the side of the boat. He starts flicking the water with his fingers.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)
SIQUEIRA: (Non-English language spoken).
GUO: He says, this is how you attract the fish. He then dips his wide green net into the water. When he lifts it out...
There they are. Oh, they're jumping around.
He's caught about a dozen little fish like little squirming eyebrows. On a good day, Siqueira can scoop up 10,000 of these little fish. He pours them into the white plastic tubs stacked along the canoe. He grew up in the nearby town of Barcelos, which, in Brazil, is known as the capital of ornamental fish. By far, their most popular export has been the cardinal tetra. By one estimate, fishermen like Siqueira were taking at least 20 million cardinals out of these waters every year. That's according to scientist Scott Dowd.
SCOTT DOWD: Twenty million's a wicked lot, as we say in Boston.
GUO: Dowd is a conservation biologist, used to work at the New England Aquarium. He's studied the cardinal tetra since the 1990s, and at first, these numbers shocked him. This one place was more or less singlehandedly supplying the entire world with cardinal tetras.
DOWD: I got a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach, and I felt, this has got to be too much.
GUO: But as Dowd and his colleagues continued to study this ecosystem, they soon realized something even more shocking - all this fishing might actually be sustainable. Turns out even 20 million was just a tiny fraction of all the cardinal tetras in these waters. For a while, this was one of the rare pieces of good news to come out of the Amazon. Here, in one of the poorest regions of Brazil, locals were making a decent living that didn't require burning down or polluting the rainforest. But Siqueira recently told us that he's not sure how much longer he'll be able to keep doing this job.
SIQUEIRA: (Non-English language spoken).
GUO: He says, he's afraid that soon this job won't even exist anymore because orders for these fish are way, way down.
SIQUEIRA: (Non-English language spoken).
GUO: You see, the people of Barcelos are now facing major competition. Fish farms in Southeast Asia have figured out how to breed the cardinal tetra in captivity. These farmed cardinals have now taken over most of the market. And the funny thing is, this is not the first time that globalization has backfired for the town of Barcelos. Back in the day, Barcelos was a hub for the Brazilian rubber industry. But then Europeans came and took the rubber trees and planted them also in Southeast Asia, so the local rubber industry faded. But this time, the town is fighting to keep its fishing industry alive with a rather modern strategy.
ARAMARA CASTRO: (Non-English language spoken).
GUO: Aramara Castro is a local fishbroker, calls herself a proud warrior fisherwoman. She's been working with scientist Scott Dowd on how to compete with the farmed fish from Southeast Asia, and their chief competitive advantage might just be their story, the story we just told you.
CASTRO: (Non-English language spoken).
GUO: Castro says, "if only you could see this town back in the day. All these boats would come in, these beautiful little white boats with the fishing nets on top."
CASTRO: (Non-English language spoken).
GUO: She told us, "wouldn't you want to be a part of that? Wouldn't you want to buy a fish that actually came from the Amazon, that was captured by a proud Amazonian fisherwoman?" So Dowd has been testing a way for customers to trace where their cardinal tetras were caught, maybe even meet the people here who caught them. In other words, the people of Barcelos are leaning into marketing. That is one way to survive in today's cutthroat global economy. Others might try to copy your product, but your story is always your own.
Jeff Guo, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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