The little pet fish that saved a town in the Amazon

0:00This message comes from Capital Group. What does leadership really look like? On The Power of Advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives who've led on the field, in the boardroom, and in their communities. It's not about titles. It's about impact. Discover what drives them and the advice they carry forward. Subscribe and start listening today. Published by Capital Group, Inc. This is Planet Money from NPR. A couple weeks ago, Planet Money producer Luis Gallo and I found ourselves on a dark, glassy river in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

0:39We climbed into a small canoe. Jeff, don't tilt us. After settling in a bit. You have to be in the middle. Wait always in the middle. We headed upriver. And we're off. We were here to investigate a change that's been happening in the worldwide multi-billion dollar business of pretty little fish. You know, those tropical fish you often see at the pet store, the neon colored ones, the ones that shimmer like sequins. Some of them actually come from the wild. In fact, one of the world's most popular species of pet fish is caught right here in the Brazilian Amazon. Our guide for the day is Valdores Cicada.

1:21People call him Deco.

1:26Deco says, get ready for an aventura, an adventure, to see what we can catch. Will you ask Deco just to tell us a little bit more about where we're going?

1:39Our producer, Luis, who speaks Portuguese, actually he speaks a lot of languages, was interpreting. He's saying that we're going upriver to get a better sense of where the fish live. because they live in shallow water. The river that we're on is called the Rio Negro, the Black River. It's one of the main tributaries of the Amazon. And for several months out of the year, the river level rises and floods the surrounding rainforests, creating this dense tropical swamp. It's like we're in the middle of a forest, but the ground is water. Totally flooded. Deco steers us through a maze of braided waterways deeper and deeper into the forest.

2:21Oh, ow! Oh, Jeff, careful with the branches. So the Rio Negro is called this because the water here is actually black. It looks like we're floating on a river of black tea. For Deco, who catches pretty little fish for a living, this unique water is the reason he has a job. You see, the color comes from the plants of the jungle. As their leaves and bark soak in the river, they release chemicals called tannins that stain the water. It is literally a kind of rainforest tea. And just like regular tea, the water here is acidic. It's slightly sour. So the fish that you find here, they are adapted to this weird water.

3:00This is where they reproduce. And for a long time, the Amazon was the only place where they reproduced. Eventually, we reach a quiet, darker part of the forest. Deco leans overboard, and he starts flicking water with his fingers.

3:19He tells us that is how you attract the fish. Deco is in his 50s. He's tan and compact with big bear paw hands. Pass the net, he says. He dips his net into the water, and when he lifts it out... Oh, there they are! There are about a dozen of these little fish, like little squirming eyebrows. Oh, they're jumping around! These ones have electric blue spots on their heads. He scoops them into a big plastic tub. So how much would one of these fish cost?

3:52Deco says in Brazil, you might pay about two Brazilian reais. That's about 40 cents. Out of that, he gets paid a few cents, which for a single fish is not a lot. But the river is teeming with these and all kinds of pretty little fish that you can sell. On a good day, Deco says, he can collect 10 ,000 of them, filling up tub after tub. Over the last few decades, people here have taken hundreds of millions of tropical fish from these flooded forests, selling them to aquariums and pet stores all over the world. These fish have been the main economic lifeline for most people in this remote part of Brazil.

4:31Deco told us he started working as a fisherman when he was 14 years old. And now, he's 54. Thanks to these tiny fish, Deco's been able to raise five kids, send them all to school. He's proud of that. But, Deco told us, he's not sure how much longer he'll be able to keep doing this job. He said he's afraid eventually this job won't even exist anymore. Because orders for these fish are way, way down. The market for pretty little fish from this part of the Amazon is drying up. And that is the reason we're here, to understand how that happened, and how some folks in this little town are trying to fight back.

5:16Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Jeff Guo. Today on the show, we are in Brazil on a mission to trace an unusual supply chain that connects this remote town in the Amazon to pet stores all over the world. A supply chain that has come under threat. Not because the fish are disappearing. This is not one of those stories. No, this problem is an age-old business problem. The fishermen and women of the Rio Negro are facing competition. Alarming competition from thousands of miles away. This message comes from Apple Card. You could be earning 2 % daily cash back on that purchase. That's because Apple Card users earn 2 % daily cash back on every purchase.

6:01including everyday items you buy online or in store when using their Apple Card with Apple Pay. Not an Apple Card customer? You can apply in the Wallet app on iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at apple.co slash benefits. We first met our Fisherman Deco in a town called Barcelos. There are no roads that lead to Barcelos. It's a few dozen streets crammed along the banks of the Rio Negro, between the river and the rainforest. There's an airstrip, a floating gas station, and a big blue and white church. In Brazil, Barcelos is known as the capital of ornamental fish.

6:45Here we are. At one point, 80 % of the economy here depended on the aquarium fish trade. These fish are so important that every year, this tiny town celebrates them with a humongous festival. It's called the Festival of the Ornamental Fish. We've been told that this thing is so spectacular that we have to see it for ourselves. When we arrive, the whole town is getting ready. It's feeling hot. All along the main strip, we see fish signs and streamers hanging off the lampposts. Like you know something's about to happen. In the town square, there's a 10-foot statue of Jesus. The pedestal that he's standing on is covered in fish art.

7:24And there's actually a specific fish that we keep seeing over and over again. This fish is on that Jesus statue. It's on all the banners around town. Oh my god, everyone's wearing t-shirts with this fish on it. This fish, it is called the Cardinal Tetra. This is the one that Deco spends most of his time trying to collect. It is bright blue with a neon red stripe down the belt. It's like a little iridescent sunflower seed. There were some on display in the tanks near the town square. There they are. So tiny. The Cardinal Tetra is one of the most popular aquarium fish in the world. In the sunlight, they glow.

8:03Yeah. You have almost certainly seen a Cardinal Tetra at some point in your life. And the person who first told us about the Cardinal Tetra and this town and this festival is a guy who has been doing everything he can to keep fishermen like Deco in business. His name is Scott Dowd. We met him by the docks near the church. Hi! Ah, it's great to finally meet you in person. Nice to meet you in person, too. Scott is a conservation biologist. He used to work at the New England Aquarium. And the first time he came to Barcelos back in the 90s, he wasn't worried about the fishing industry. He was worried about the fish.

8:39He told us that at one point, Barcelos was almost single-handedly supplying the global demand for Cardinal Tetris. So he and his colleagues were trying to figure out just how many cardinals the locals were collecting every year and if that was sustainable. We concluded that there were at least 20 million cardinal tetras taken every year. Every year? From this region. That sounds like a lot, but is that a lot? Yeah, 20 million is a wicked lot, as we say in Boston. And that was just the fish that they could count. Scott estimated that the total number could even be double that, 40 million fish every year.

9:20And at that point, I got a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach. And I felt this has got to be too much. But then, as they started to study this part of the Amazon, they discovered two things. First, that there were a lot of Cardinal Tetras in these waters. So many that even 40 million was just a drop in the bucket. They also learned that most of these cardinal tetras are doomed to live very short lives. Every year there is a dry season, the river level goes down, and millions of them die. So Scott and his colleagues started to think that collecting these cardinal tetras was maybe more than just sustainable.

10:02It might actually be good for the Amazon and for the people of Barcelos. Because if the locals could make a living collecting these fish, who would otherwise die, then they wouldn't be doing destructive things to the Amazon. Like, I don't know, burning it down to make room for cattle, which is a real thing that happens. Scott remembers going to a big fish conservation conference to announce these findings. And I was quite nervous to take this podium. Here I was about to tell these people that have fish named after them. They've written the textbooks that I grew up on. I was about to tell them that I was advocating for the extraction of potentially 40 million individual freshwater fish every year.

10:46And it's a good thing. Usually conservation biologists, they are trying to advocate for the opposite, for keeping animals in nature. So this was like telling a bunch of dentists, hey, here is a type of candy that is actually good for you. I was prepared at that podium to be pelted with fruit and shoes. But he wasn't. His fellow conservation biologists looked at his data and believed what he was saying, that the cardinal tetra industry was helping and not hurting the environment. I was almost in tears. I was shocked. So Scott kept coming back to Barcelos, year after year, getting closer and closer with the fishermen and fisherwomen, watching this annual festival get bigger and bigger.

11:30Just this explosion of joy and happiness and celebration for these little fish and the impact they've had on this community. Scott told us, it's hard to understand until you see this festival. The stadium is huge. The main event takes place inside this incongruously large stadium. Should we enter, Jeff? Yeah, let's go take a look inside. Yeah. When Luis and I arrive, there is an announcer counting down to the start of the show. Five minutes to go. Luis, this is popping. This stadium is called the Piabodromo. Here in Barcelos, Piaba is the word for little fish. So this gleaming white, multi-story Piaba-drome is literally a stadium dedicated to the little fish.

12:17Three minutes to go. Up in the box seats, we meet the mayor. As well as Miss Barcelos. What's your name? Isabelle. Isabelle. Who is wearing this glittering dress and sash. She told us her grandfather was a cardinal tetra fisherman. And then, we are seconds away. The dramatic music. Yeah. The countdown. 37 seconds. 36. And the show is on. Senhoras e senhores, com vocês, CARDINAL!

13:00A man steps out in an enormous feathered headdress and he's welcoming everybody to Barcelos, the place where the cardinal is the king. And then the dancers come out, dozens and dozens of them in sequined costumes doing all kinds of complicated choreography.

13:24The whole crowd is singing along, we are cardinals, we are cardinals. And then, okay, a five-story crane is rolled out, and there is Isabelli, you know, Miss Barcelos. She's wearing a tiara and descending in a basket covered in pink butterflies. And then she's holding this bedazzled, oversized Cardinal Tetra and dancing with it.

13:51And okay, we are not going to describe this whole event for you because, well, this went on for more than five hours straight. No joke. There were multiple costume changes. They brought in parade floats. We saw a fully motorized Cardinal Tetra the size of a houseboat. Some of these floats even had fireworks shooting out of them. This was better than any Super Bowl halftime show you have ever seen. But the whole time we were there, there was this one thought that kept bothering me. Because here was all this hullabaloo about these fish, about the Cardinal Tetra, about a business that we knew was in trouble.

14:33The next day, when we talked to some actual fishermen and fisherwomen, they were telling us a much less optimistic story about Barcelos and about the Cardinal Tetra. Scott introduced us to one of them. Her name is Ara Mar Castro, Mara for short.

14:53Mara calls herself a proud piaberra warrior. Piaberra is the local word for someone who collects these little fish, these little piaba. And a lot of the local piaberras and piaberros, folks like Deco, they bring their fish to Mara. She and her husband are kind of like fish brokers. They sort the fish and send them downriver to the exporters. who, in turn, put the fish on planes and send them all around the world.

15:22Mar told us the best time to be a piaberra harvesting these ornamental fish was back in the 90s and early 2000s. That's when the business was at its peak. She said, if only you could see the port back then. All these boats would come in, these beautiful little white boats with fishing nets on top, the fishing nets of the piaberos. There used to be hundreds of them out there fishing, Mara said. But then something happened that would turn Mara and Deco and Scott's world completely upside down. It was the year 2000. Scott was back in his office at the New England Aquarium, just flipping through one of his fish magazines, when he saw a photo of a beautiful cardinal tetra.

16:07But this wasn't a wild cardinal tetra from the Amazon. No, this was a farmed cardinal from Florida. You see, even though most aquarium fish are farmed. Cardinal Tetris come from very unusual water. It wasn't easy to produce these fish on fish farms. But now you had this article celebrating how fish breeders in Florida had cracked the code. Scott felt sick. I actually scanned that page to show the fishers. On his next trip to Barcelos, Scott delivered the news. There were gasps, and it was quite an eye-opener. Everybody knew what this meant. The people of the Amazon no longer had the monopoly on this popular pet fish.

16:57Competition was coming. And Scott says there is no way to overstate just how big of a deal this was. The world changed for me, and the world changed for Barcelos, and it changed for the whole forest. Everything changed. Now, it didn't change all at once. But slowly, these farmed cardinals started making their way onto the market. By the late 2000s, demand for cardinal tetras from their natural habitat in the Amazon was plummeting. Mara told us she saw a lot of her fellow piaberos and piaberas giving up, and wondered if she should give up too. I was desperate. And when the sale was bad, bad even, I and him were talking, right?

17:41And now, what are we going to do? So she was desperate. She was like, yeah, like, what are we going to do? But, you know, Mara calls herself a piaberra warrior. So there was only one choice. She was going to stay in the business, stay and fight. And Scott was going to help. He's known Mara and her family since she was a little kid. We thought, okay, it's game on. We have to compete and we have to win. What do we have to do to make Barcelos Cardinal Tetras the most lucrative, the most attractive to everybody in the supply chain? Scott now runs a nonprofit called Project Piaba, which is a bunch of volunteers in the U.S.

18:21and Brazil trying to keep this Cardinal Tetra industry alive in Barcelos. Marr told us the number of piaberos and piaberas has gone from hundreds to only about 30 nowadays who are still actively fishing. And what they're up against are these vast fish farms in Singapore and Vietnam and Malaysia, who have all figured out not only how to breed these cardinal tetras in captivity, but how to do it on an industrial scale. And look at it this way. These piaberos and piaberas face a classic business problem. Someone has come out with a competing product and is eating their lunch. So what do they do? Well, if this was a business school case study, this is where the professor would ask, what are your competitive advantages?

19:05And what are your competitive disadvantages? One disadvantage for the wild cardinals is that they come from this unusual water. So they sometimes struggle to adapt to life in an aquarium. So now Scott's been working with other scientists to design this special regimen to help wild-caught cardinals get used to life in captivity before they get sold. We prepare them for their life in aquariums. They receive the best fish food in the world. We also acclimate them for pH. So what I'm imagining is this fancy pants finishing school for fish. Exactly. Another disadvantage is that there's a lot of red tape in Brazil, so it can take weeks to get these fish out of the country.

19:46Mara and Scott have been lobbying the government to speed things up. But Scott's major project recently is to try to promote what he sees as the wild cardinal tetra's greatest advantage over their farmed cousins. Which is that these fish are wild. They have a story. So Scott's been working on a way for potential customers to trace exactly where their wild cardinals were caught. And to learn about the piaberra or piaberra who caught them. Maybe even watch a video of the festival. We're giving them access to the story of where their fish came from, the people that caught their fish, the impact that has had on the lives of these rural Amazonians.

20:27So it's kind of like the photo of the farmer that you see on the side of your fair trade coffee bag. Do you really think you can bring this big business back? I don't know. I can't stop trying, though. Now, there is a version of this story that ends right here, with a big question mark about the future of this little town that depends so much on this tiny little fish. But while we were in Barcelos, we also learned about this other fish, a much bigger fish. The story of that is after the break.

21:08This message comes from Capital Group. What does leadership really look like? On The Power of Advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives who've led on the field, in the boardroom, and in their communities. It's not about titles. It's about impact. Discover what drives them and the advice they carry forward. Subscribe and start listening today. Published by Capital Group, Inc.

21:36One of the reasons we came all the way to Barcelos is to try and understand what happens in a town where the main industry, the industry that most people depended on, is fading away. And when we were out there in the flooded forests with Deco, he told us this story about the town's history, a story that started to put everything that was happening to the Pia Barros and to Barcelos, into perspective. It was late in the morning. We had spent hours with Deco, watching him flick the water to attract the little fish. He told us about the good old days. Back when he was a teenager, being a fisherman was just what everybody did.

22:18It was a good living. He told us he would drink a lot and have fun and wouldn't plan for the future. He said, maybe we thought that things would just keep getting better and better. But then it ended. We'd gotten to a place on the water where it felt like the trees were closing in on us. Deco was using a red paddle to steer us past the logs floating in the water. And from time to time, he'd snap off a branch from a nearby sapling to mark which path we'd taken. And that is when Deco told us a story about his parents. Because his parents were not piaberos. Back then, the main industry in Barcelos was something else.

23:01He told us that his parents worked in the rubber industry, latex. Everybody worked in the rubber industry. Before the town was known as the capital of ornamental fish, it was known for its rubber. Rubber trees come from the Amazon, and Barcelos was part of the huge Amazonian rubber boom in the early 1900s. But by the time Deco was growing up in the 70s, that industry had long been fading away. What happened to their jobs? Your parents worked with a bag. What happened with that? What happened was that they stopped. Because there was a plant there, they didn't need to buy baccellus. So they stopped.

23:47So the demand for rubber stopped, so their jobs ended. Deco told us nobody could pay their bills, Everyone owed money. Everyone went under. And the reason the world stopped buying their rubber? It was competition. Foreigners had taken this valuable tree from the Amazon and figured out how to grow it in other places. They set up huge rubber plantations in Southeast Asia. Nowadays, the biggest producers of natural rubber are Thailand and Indonesia and Vietnam.

24:21Deco says, yeah, after they planted the trees over there, the world didn't need to buy rubber from Barcelos anymore. So people started to move away. Whole towns were disappearing. As a kid, Deco himself wasn't sure if he'd be able to stay in Barcelos. Except there was this little fish, the Cardinal Tetra. Some explorers had come through in the 1950s and noticed that it was prettier than any little tetra the world had ever seen. And so, the gears of a new economy started turning. The Cardinal Tetra essentially saved the town of Barcelos. But now, competition has come for these Cardinal Tetras. And it's almost like the exact same story all over again.