New research shows that the arapaima is being fished to extinction in many areas of Brazil. If anybody has the influence and ideas to help save the arapaima, now would be a good time to use them... The Amazon’s largest fish is going extinct - The Washington Post
This may be an idea to save the Arapaima : Locals Are Saving an Enormous Tropical Fish From Extinction
This may be slightly off topic but which is the species kept in captivity? I know they were split a little while back. Is captive breeding a potential solution for this/these species? ~Thylo
If you accept more than one species, then the one commonly kept in aquariums should be Arapaima arapaima. A name that maybe should be unaccepted, because animals whose specific epithet is the same than the generic one (Vulpes vulpes, Meles meles, Melolontha melolontha, Galbula galbula, etc) are authomatically designated as the type species of the genus, and the type species should be always the first described one, that in this case would be Arapaima gigas. Captive breeding is being made in industrial scale since many years ago, overall for supply arapaimas for the market of the fish meat. Also, arapaimas has veen introduced in other continents (overall in Asia) where they devastate native fishes both by predation and competition. It's atonishing that a species so extremely famous (one of the most famous of all fishes) and so heavily impacted by human threats (overfishing) was not evaluated by IUCN, that already evaluated species like almost unknown minute non-endangered snails from some unaccesible part of Europe, for example.
The classic example of a sustainable arapaima fishery is the Mamiraua Reserve in Brazil, which saw stocks increase ninefold in eight years. The key was integrating local stakeholders into the decision-making process and employing classic source-sink dynamics: at any given time, some of the reserve is used by large commercial fishing boats, some is resting from exploitation and only used by artisanal fishermen, and some is never fished. As a relevant coincidence, this paper on commercial exploitation in the Amazon was just published in Science Advances: Empty forest or empty rivers? A century of commercial hunting in Amazonia | Science Advances
Sorry for the late reply So will the animals kept in Europe (listed as A. gigas on ztl, which appears to recognize at least one of the new species) still be A. arapaima? Are there any known animals of other species about? ~Thylo
Captive breeding ( farming ) of the arapaima in Brazil : http://www.scielo.br/pdf/aa/v48n1/1809-4392-aa-48-01-38.pdf