- A community-based monitoring project is helping protect the rich diversity of freshwater fish species in the Ramsar-listed wetlands in the Colombian Amazon.
- By combining ancestral knowledge with scientific tools, Indigenous Amazonian leaders say their communities are strengthening their connection to their territory.
- Community monitoring and training efforts have helped inform fishing regulations to better protect ecosystems and ensure the sustainability of local populations’ livelihoods.
When Fredy Yavinape was a young child, he didn’t know the biological concept of an “umbrella species.” These are species that require large areas of undisturbed habitat to survive, which is why they serve as an indicator of the conservation status of the entire ecosystem. Now, at 48 years old, Yavinape knows what they are. He’s spent more than a decade collecting samples and documenting the daily events that occur in the vast territory of lagoons and rivers where he resides: Estrella Fluvial del Inírida, or EFI. This is an important complex of wetlands in eastern Colombia, formed by the confluence of the Inírida, Guaviare and Atabapo rivers, where the Amazon Rainforest meets the flood-prone savannas of the Orinoquía.
“Every time anyone left, my father said to us, ‘Watch out for Grandpa; he must be around here. Don’t bother him. He could be fishing or hunting — you have to respect him,’” Yavinape says. The “grandpa” his father was referring to was a jaguar, said to be the ancestor of the Curripaco Indigenous people. Yavinape even has the big cat’s in his surname: In his native language, “Yavinape” means “jaguar’s arm.”
“He’s always watching, wherever a jaguar is. That means that there’s food there,” he says. The last time he encountered one, he says, was in December 2024, during his monitoring work through the Ramsar board, of which Yavinape is president.
The Ramsar board is a governing entity established by local communities and Indigenous peoples in the area following the Colombian government’s declaration of the EFI as a Ramsar site — a wetland of global importance — in July 2014. With that declaration, the country committed to the special protection of 253,000 hectares (625,000 acres) of wetlands, lagoons and bodies of water at the confluence of the three rivers. These rivers join the Ventuari River, on Venezuela’s side of the border, eventually feeding into the mighty Orinoco.
Colombia is one of the 172 countries that’s a party to the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty that seeks to protect wetlands as “a resource of great economic, cultural, scientific and recreational value, whose loss would be irreparable.” This is because of wetlands’ importance as regulators of hydrological systems and as habitats for a rich diversity of fauna and flora, especially aquatic birds.
The same year that the EFI was declared a Ramsar site, a management plan was formulated. Alongside the local Indigenous communities, the plan established a process to conduct fish monitoring to better understand the conservation status of the species on which the region’s Indigenous people rely for food.
The campesino communities in the region, in addition to the seven Indigenous reserves belonging to the Puinave, Curripaco, Tucano, Piapoco, Cubeo, Sikuani and Wanano peoples, span parts of the Guaviare, Inírida and Atabapo river basins. This, according to Indigenous leaders, makes the Ramsar board a valuable tool for protecting these territories, which are threatened by illegal activities such as drug trafficking and mining, as well as uncontrolled fishing and the unsustainable use of natural resources.
A successful community governance model
“This is our food security; monitoring helps us to have clarity for a diagnosis,” Yavinape says. Poor fishing practices, combined with a mining boom in the 1980s in the region’s rivers, led to a decline in many species, according to Yavinape.
Delio Suárez, 60, an Indigenous leader from the Tucano community, agrees that there’s been a depletion of fish stocks.
“I grew up here. It was very different. There were so many fish — big fish. [People] never went far to fish. There were a lot. In one day, you’d catch [enough fish] for a week,” Suárez says. “These days, that all has changed. It’s like a dream, the abundance of fish at that time. Now, the [human] population has grown, needs have grown, and there are a lot of fishers who use a net; that has been the problem.”
Suárez says nylon nets were unknown to the region’s Indigenous communities until the gold-mining boom of the mid-1980s, which was driven by wildcat miners from across the border in Brazil, who dredged the Inírida River for “20 consecutive years.”
“The Brazilians brought small nets, which are still here,” Suárez says. These nets represented a radical departure from local Indigenous fishing methods, as they caught many more fish of all sizes, according to Suárez. This, he says, contributed to the depletion of the area’s fish.
Suárez says he learned from his elders what they learned from theirs about how to fish: weaving cacures, or traps, made from palm fronds and laced with bait and submerged underwater. To catch black spot piranhas (Pygocentrus cariba), for instance, known locally as caribes, lizards are used as bait. Suárez says.
Traditional fishing methods also include harpoons, arrows, and even the controversial use of barbasco. This is the common name of several Amazonian plants from the genera Caryocar, Lonchocarpus, Tephrosia, Clibadium and Phyllanthus, which contain toxins capable of paralyzing or even killing fish. Although it’s a thousand-year-old fishing method, it’s now banned by most communities due to its harmful impact on fish populations.
Many Indigenous communities rely on fishing for their survival. In the region, there are 476 known species of fish, accounting for half of the known species that inhabit the Orinoco River Basin, according to data from the management plan for the EFI Ramsar site. The area is an important biodiversity reservoir, assessed to host 100 amphibian and reptile species, 324 bird species, and more than 200 mammal species, which local communities have recently also begun to monitor on their trips through the forest.
Jaime Cabrera is a biologist and monitoring coordinator for WWF, which is supporting the monitoring efforts. He says the communities’ ancestral knowledge and the data they gather in their daily tasks play a crucial role in contributing to scientific understanding of the behavior of freshwater species in the area. Their contributions also help build up data on the species’ spawning cycles and reproduction, as well as the effects of climate change, such as droughts and more prolonged rainy seasons, on the ecosystem.
The fish monitoring has identified 108 different species of fish that form part of the local communities’ diets. The work has also provided key data used to inform fishing restrictions imposed by the National Aquaculture and Fisheries Authority (AUNAP) in the region.
“From the start, the Indigenous [people] have said, ‘Those closed seasons are bad,’” Cabrera says, adding that he responded, “’You know that already, but we have to demonstrate that to the environmental authority.’”
The process that followed, still used by the communities, involves maintaining a detailed record of each fishing trip, including departure time, duration at a site, number of individual fish caught and species, among other data.
In a response for this story, AUNAP said it recognizes the value of this process, indicating that the regulations and agreements are “adapted to the particularities and characteristics of each community.” The regulations “protect the ecosystem and its biodiversity, but also guarantee an equitable distribution of the benefits generated by fishing activity for the local communities.”
“It is a normal part of fishing; once you’re home, you weigh and measure [the fish], to determine whether they are adults, you open them and review their stomach contents,” Suárez said. “That is how we collected the information about all the fish in our rivers.”
All the data are recorded and organized with the help of WWF. Using evidence obtained over five years, from 2014 and 2019, the Indigenous communities demonstrated to AUNAP that the existing closed seasons and restrictions were poorly stipulated, as some of the species were smaller during their reproductive period than what AUNAP had presumed.
Among the most relevant findings was that, in the case of four of the most targeted species, sexual maturity occurs when the fish are at smaller sizes than those allowed to be caught by AUNAP. This was the case for bocón (Brycon spp.), which begins to reproduce when it reaches a length of 31 centimeters (12 inches). Yet AUNAP restrictions prohibited the capture of specimens smaller than 40 cm (16 in). Driftwood catfish (Angeneiosus spp.), which also reach sexual maturity at about the same length, could only be caught when larger than 35 cm (14 in). In the case of palometa (Mylossoma spp.) and freshwater ray-finned fish, also known as bocachico (Prochilodus spp.), which begin to reproduce at 21 and 25 cm (8 and 10 in) in length, respectively, the fishing authority only allowed them to be caught when they reached 23 and 27 cm (9 and 11 in) in length.
In an initial resolution issued in 2020, AUNAP recognized what the Indigenous people had proven with scientific evidence: that “the average size at sexual maturity is a smaller range” and that “among the most abundant species recorded during monitoring work” included driftwood catfish, palometa and bocachico, among other fish.
The resolution recognized traditional fishing tools such as cacures to catch live fish in the river. It also recognized the use of arrows and harpoons, which the Indigenous people have fished with for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years.
The resolution also included modern fishing gear introduced to the area by settlers, such as goggles and nets, which are specifically prohibited for commercial fishing in many places within the Ramsar site. However, nets are allowed for subsistence fishing in some communities as long as the mesh size is larger than 6.7 cm (2.6 in).
A second AUNAP resolution, from 2022, included new data about the reproductive lives of fish for consumption and for ornamental uses, such as sapuara (Semaprochilodus laticeps). A study had found their spawning and reproduction occur between March and June, not beginning in May as was previously believed. This led to changes in the scheduling of closed seasons and fishing bans.
However, disruptions to the water cycle due to global warming are a cause for concern for scientists and Indigenous communities. The timing of the rainy and dry seasons, which used to occur at predictable periods of the year, is now much hazier, changing the behavior of many species.
Suárez, the Indigenous leader, says fish also have specific sites for spawning: “With climate change, there have been lots of problems, because sometimes the river is dry and they don’t know where to lay their eggs.”
In the Guaviare River, in particular, he says, “We have a serious problem; the fish are dying out.”
The river was hit hard during the 2024 dry season, with the water level dropping to 3.75 meters (12.3 feet) at a point where it would typically exceed 9 m (29 feet), according to local media.
Yavinape, the Ramsar board president, says that during their daily trips to the water, community members report that “the fish are acting crazy; they’re disoriented” due to climate instability.
“The seasonal cycles used to be very defined. Summer went from November to March, and the rain followed, but now, with climate change, sometimes it rains and the river rises. The fish become disoriented because they believe winter has already arrived. This was detected through monitoring.”
Yavinape says this kind of information will be used to inform urgent action, including possible changes to fishing regulations. The impacts have also been seen on other freshwater animals, including several threatened species of turtles, such as the yellow-spotted river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis) and the Arrau turtle (Podocnemis expansa).
“It has been found that they spawn on beaches, but during the spawning season, it is flooded and there aren’t [the right] conditions for them. Or, at times, it’s dry, but the river rises and the eggs are damaged,” Yavinape says.
The Tarapoto Lakes: Another bastion of Indigenous conservation
The effects of climate change are already a serious problem for the Amazon Basin, where an extreme drought has reached the point of affecting river navigation, according to Lilia Java. She speaks at the Tarapoto Lakes, a complex of 22 wetlands and bodies of water covering 45,000 hectares (111,000 acres), connected to the enormous Amazon River. In 2018, the Tarapoto Lakes were declared a Ramsar site — the first in the Colombian Amazon.
Asked by Mongabay whether the lakes were affected by the droughts of 2024 and 2023 that reduced the flow of the Amazon and several of its tributaries to unprecedented levels, Java says: “Not simply affected, they dried up. We were the ones affected, because we had no fish to eat.”
Java is an Indigenous Kokama, a community that inhabits a reserve alongside people from the Tikuna and Yagua nations. In this reserve, a fish-monitoring program, named the Lookout of the Lakes of Tarapoto (Vigías de los Lagos de Tarapoto), has also been implemented with Indigenous communities.
“It has been difficult, but we keep working; we keep fighting,” says Java, who calls for more support for this initiative. According to Java, the monitors who gather data at the Tarapoto Lakes receive financial support for food and basic necessities, but they hope to formalize their work by receiving a salary.
Monitoring began in 2012, and now includes a raft for use in the work. The monitors ensure compliance with the fishing regulations and community fishing agreements that have been authorized by AUNAP. Their work has also helped reintroduce aquatic mammals into the ecosystem, such as Amazonian manatees (Trichechus inunguis).
In 2009, responsible fishing agreements were created in Tarapoto, receiving recognition by AUNAP in a 2017 resolution. The agreements form part of the life plan of the Ticoya Reserve, and have become internal community regulations. They include limits on the amount of fish authorized to be caught by each family group, the establishment of permissible fishing methods, and a ban on the capture of some species, such as the arapaima (Arapaima gigas). They also prohibit the entry of commercial fishing boats to the lakes, as well as the use of firearms and toxic substances.
This has allowed three species to return that “were already disappearing from the ecosystem,” according to Java: arapaima, tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum) — a favorite in the local diet — and oscar (Astronotus ocellatus).
“These species have recovered — not in large quantities, but they have reappeared through monitoring,” Java says. “We’ve also identified arapaima nests, [and] this has helped motivate us to continue monitoring.”
Cabrera from WWF says he believes conservation must be done with the people, not without them. He sums up the cultural governance that Indigenous communities exercise over their territories in three points: caring for it, governing it, and utilizing it. According to Cabrera, this is, in essence, a single practice.
“You can’t take care of something that you don’t know. The basis for caring for it is knowing what is happening in the territories,” he says.
Cabrera adds that traditional knowledge is as important as the advancements made by Western science: “It is all science; what we do is science, and what they do is science, too.”
“[People] would interact with piranhas, with jaguars, with anacondas; they all seemed like family,” Yavinape says. “They were like another [part] of the home, another [family member] in the yard.”
He speaks with a mixture of enthusiasm and nostalgia as he goes on to discuss the dilemma of confronting climate change and the collapse of species in one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet.
“You look out for your neighbor: ‘What happened with that anaconda or with that caiman that we had at the entrance to the village?’ The day that we didn’t see them, it felt like someone was missing.”
This story was first published here in Spanish on May 6, 2025, as a collaboration between Baudó Agencia Pública and Mongabay Latam.
Banner image: Illustration by Sara Arredondo/Baudó Agencia Pública.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of the project “The Rights of the Amazon in Sight: The Protection of Communities and Forests,” a series of investigative reports about the situation surrounding deforestation and environmental crimes in Colombia, funded by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI). Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence from outside influence.
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