The immense ecosystem of the Amazon Rainforest means looking for fish in the Amazon can be a pretty exciting experience. From the weird and wonderful to the outright bizarre looking, the Amazon River is filled with fish, many of which you may have never heard of and may never find anywhere else.
Covering around 30% of South America, the Amazon River Basin is home to well over 2,000 different species of fish that are endemic to the Amazon region, this includes 15,000 tributaries and a total length of 6,520 km. Brazil has some of the most interesting and biggest fish in the region, while plenty more reside in the waters of the other countries that are home to the Amazon.
The region creates and destroys river banks every year, and as a result there are a large number of species that have become isolated in just one lake. In those large lakes many fish evolve and branch away from their distant cousins until they, some thousands of years later through the flooded forest, are released into the main channel and reunited with the aquatic fauna.
This cycle has happened thousands of times in the Amazon lowland areas. It gets even more interesting when occasionally the isolated lakes dry up and many of the fish in the lake have adapted to air breathing or gulping at the surface of water, so much so that many fish can actually leave the lake to find water. This can be seen with the armored catfish and the electric eel species.
Read through our guide to some of the Amazon's best known fish before your trip, and see if you can spot them!The immense ecosystem of the Amazon Rainforest means looking for fish in the Amazon can be a pretty exciting experience. From the weird and wonderful to the outright bizarre looking, the Amazon River is filled with fish, many of which you may have never heard of and may never find anywhere else.
Covering around 30% of South America, the Amazon River Basin is home to well over 2,000 different species of fish that are endemic to the Amazon region, this includes 15,000 tributaries and a total length of 6,520 km. Brazil has some of the most interesting and biggest fish in the region, while plenty more reside in the waters of the other countries that are home to the Amazon.
The region creates and destroys river banks every year, and as a result there are a large number of species that have become isolated in just one lake. In those large lakes many fish evolve and branch away from their distant cousins until they, some thousands of years later through the flooded forest, are released into the main channel and reunited with the aquatic fauna.
This cycle has happened thousands of times in the Amazon lowland areas. It gets even more interesting when occasionally the isolated lakes dry up and many of the fish in the lake have adapted to air breathing or gulping at the surface of water, so much so that many fish can actually leave the lake to find water. This can be seen with the armored catfish and the electric eel species.
Read through our guide to some of the Amazon's best known fish before your trip, and see if you can spot them!
Posted by , Published at February 24, 2018 and have
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