Abenteuer Amazonas – Wie kleine Fische den Größten Regenwald der Welt retten

Solingen 2019, HC., 73 pages, 68 colour photographs. The Amazon rainforest is one of the most important places on earth. It produces around 20% of the world’s oxygen and absorbs a correspondingly large amount of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to climate change. However, large parts of the rainforest are under threat from slash-and-burn agriculture, cattle breeding, deforestation and gold mining. The Piaba Project is a collaboration between western scientists, aquarium hobbyists and natives who have been fishing sustainably for 30 years. Its aim is to collect aquarium fish in the most gentle way possible so that they arrive healthy and safe at their end destinations. These goals are achieved through training courses and seminars. Since the ornamental fish collectors make their living in this way, it is in their interest to leave the rainforest intact. By catching the piaba—the local name for the small aquarium fish from there, above all the red neon—they actually help to preserve, directly or indirectly, more than 1 000 species of animals, such as the pink dolphin and the largest tarantula in the world. A worldwide import ban of ornamental fish would have catastrophic consequences for the region’s human population and especially for the rainforest—its waters, animals and plants. In German.