October 14, 2013 — A new type of giant Amazonian fish — one for which only a single species was known for more than a century — has been discovered in Brazil, scientists say.
The fish is a new species of arapaima, which are huge freshwater fish native to the Amazon River in Brazil. The discovery suggests there may be important new conservation issues to consider, particularly with regards to overfishing and the region's expanding fish farming industry.
"Everybody for 160 years had been saying there's only one kind of arapaima," Donald Stewart, a professor in the department of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York in Syracuse, said in a statement. "But we know now there are various species, including some not previously recognized. Each of these unstudied giant fishes needs conservation assessment."
Arapaima are one of the most important commercial fishes in the Amazon, but their diversity has long been overlooked, Stewart said. [Photos of the Largest Fish on Earth]
In the mid-1800s, four species of arapaima were recognized. Then, in 1868, Albert Günther, a scientist at the British Museum of Natural History, published an opinion piece that lumped all arapaima into one species: Arapaima gigas. Günther's views eventually became the commonly accepted classification.
Stewart sifted through 19th-century scientific literature and studied original specimens that had been preserved at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and found that all four of the species originally described in the mid-1800s were distinct.