Cachama

• alimentaciónIts teeth are set much like a person's, adapted to crush the hard fruit and seeds that drop into the water from the flooded forest of the Amazon.
• It is a seed disperser comparable to the large land-dwelling frugivores: it swims for kilometres through the flooded forest and deposits the seeds of dozens of tree species intact, an ecological role almost unique among fish.
• Its gill rakers also let it filter zooplankton, so it can feed on fruit or on plankton depending on the season.
• The loss of the large individuals to overfishing reduces the regeneration of the flooded forests that depend on them.
• It is a fish that plants trees. It eats the fruit that falls into the water in the flooded forest, digests the pulp and passes the seeds intact, dispersing them through the forest.
• The distances are not small: the average is around 300 to 500 metres and the recorded maximum exceeds five kilometres. It is one of the most important seed dispersers in Amazonia, a role played in other forests by birds and monkeys.
• Its dentition makes this possible: it combines molar-like teeth for crushing fruit and hard seeds with elongated gill rakers for filtering zooplankton, so it can exploit two completely different resources.
• It is the largest characiform in the Amazon basin: it reaches a metre in length and 30 kg.
• It has been overfished for more than forty years, and much of what is caught are juveniles. Its decline does not affect the species alone: losing the disperser compromises the regeneration of the flooded forest itself.
• It is one of the main species in Brazilian aquaculture, partly precisely to relieve pressure on wild populations.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (fish)

Habitat & environment

Rivers and flooded forest of the Amazon and Orinoco basins

Sources consulted: Lista Roja de la UICN; Goulding, The Fish and the Forest; Anderson, Saldaña Rojas y Flecker (2009), Oecologia; USGS