June 6th - Day Four

We woke up early in the morning to go to the market down by the docks to buy hammocks to sleep in while staying on the boat. After purchasing a hammock from a vendor off the streets, we got on a boat that would take us up and down the Amazon for the next couple of days. First the boat took us to see the mixing of the waters. It was interesting to be able to compare what the mixing waters looked like from the boat and from the air the day before. Next we went to a families house that raised pirarucu and catfish in the Amazon. Commercial fishing of the pirarucu has been banned by the Brazilian government due to its commercial extinction. Fishing is allowed only in certain remote areas of the Amazon basin, and must be catch-and-release, or harvesting by native peoples for consumption. We had an opportunity to fish them and I caught one that was missing an eye, but of course I released it. These fish can grow to be four meters long and can weigh up to 150 kilograms. They are also the largest fresh water fish and their tongues have teeth that act as a second jaw. 

After visiting the fish farmers on the Amazon, Patrick took us on his boat to look at the floating villages on the river. The people that live in these villages live on houses that are built on balsa wood rafts. When the river floods, these houses go up and down with the river and are prevented from flooding. Many of the other houses and villages on the river are built on stilts and whenever there is unusual flooding on the river, these people have to move to higher land. Often this just means building another floor onto their homes. The balsa wood is a very lightweight material with many uses. Balsa trees are native to southern Brazil and Bolivia north to southern Mexico. These balsa rafts usually have a life of sixty years and must be replaced after this. However, the government no longer allows people to harvest the balsa wood trees so these people will soon need to relocate or find another material to make their floats out of. I am curious as to where the waste that these villages produce ends up. I hope that there is a barge that comes and picks it up; however, it may just end up in the river. 

We also visited a family whose teenage son had caught several Amazonian animals. First he brought out a baby three-toed sloth. The three-toed sloth is arboreal (tree-dwelling), with a body adapted to hang by its limbs. It lives high in the canopy but descends once a week to defecate on the forest floor. Its long, coarse, grayish-brown fur often appears greenish, not due to pigment but to algae growing on it. The sloth’s greenish color and its sluggish habits provide an effective camouflage: hanging quietly, the sloth resembles a bundle of leaves. Large curved claws help the sloth to keep a strong grip on tree branches. 

As mentioned in The River of Doubt, there is plenty of life in the rainforest that uses protective coloration or develops a symbiotic relationship with plants and insects that can do the job for them. Sloths are so stealthy and numerous that it is likely that they remained hidden even when we were walking in the jungle. Roosevelts expedition had plenty of wild game around them, they just did not know how to look for it. The boy had apparently caught the young sloth while climbing in the trees.

In addition to an abundance of prey in the rainforest, there are also plenty of other more predatory species. For example dangerous caiman which are relatively small crocodilians, with most species reaching lengths of only a few metres. The smallest being the Cuvier's dwarf caiman, which grows to 1 meter (3 feet) long and the largest being the black caiman, which can grow to 4 metres (13 ft) or more. We had seen the three different types of species of alligators that are found in the Amazon the day before at the biological reserve. The young caiman that the boy brought out was one of three that he had in his house. 

The caiman alligator often sits very still in the water and looks very similar to a floating log. When we were in Patrick's speed boat we were pretty close to the waters edge and often it made me think of how Roosevelt and his men must have felt in their crude dugouts. They were weighed down with so much useless material due to poor expedition management, they must have been mere inches from the water. I do not know how the men were able to put the caiman out of their minds.

The boy also brought out a boa constrictor which was a little more scary than the caiman. It did not seem very docile and had been found in the wild. As it describes in The River of Doubt "some of the world's deadliest serpents [are] coiled on the forest floor and in the lower branches of trees." One of my biggest fears in the Amazon was that a snake would fall from a low hanging branch or spring up from beneath a log and bite me. Ananas, our guide, gave us a helpful tip to step on top of the log first instead of over. That way you avoid the snake from sneaking up on you when you step on top of the log. Listening to Ananas, I have a new appreciation for living in the rainforest and on the river. He knows so much about surviving on the Amazon and I would really like to go hiking with him.

After taking pictures with all the boys animals, we visited a natural preserve where giant lily pads were growing. These lily pads only grow during the wet season when the Amazon is swollen and then die during the dry season.