faulker098

Commonly in Brazil people say “It is a fishers’ story”, when they refer to someone who is telling something that possibly is not true or that has been overstated. Well, surprisingly the information revealed by fishers are increasingly become an issue of interest to fishery scientists, managers and policy makers. Fishers have been turned in good suppliers of reliable facts. Let me explain it! The majority of small-scale fisheries in developing countries usually have no data available to assess the stock status of target populations. Consequentely, to fulfill this gap, fishers have been called to tell what they know about it. This fact was recently showed in a paper about the small-scale fishery developed in one of the main hydroelectric reservoir in Brazil: the Itaipu reservoir (Fig 1).  Fig.1: the Itaipu reservoir  This reservoir produces the 25% of energy consumed in Brazil and borders Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay (Fig 2). During this research, we looked for the most experienced fi