When You Get What You Haven't Paid for: Molecular Identification of "douradinha" Fish Fillets Can Help End the Illegal Use of River Dolphins as Bait in Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Cunha, Haydée A.
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Silva, Vera Maria Ferreira da, Santos, Teresa E.C., Moreira, Stella M., Carmo, Nívia A.S. do, Solé-Cava, António Mateo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do INPA
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.inpa.gov.br/handle/1/19962
• topic: Cytochrome B; Dna, Mitochondrial; Dna, Mitochondrial; Animals Experiment; Brasil; Caiman; Calophysus; Calophysus Macropterus; Catfish; Conference Paper; Consumer; Dna Sequence; Dolphin; Fishery; Food Industry; Fraud; Market; Mass Medium; Molecular Biology; Nonhuman; Priority Journal; River; Stomach Content; Animals; Catfish; Classification; Dolphin; Ethics; Fishery; Food Analysis; Food Industry; Genetics; Procedures; Seafood; Stomach Juice; Caiman; Inia Geoffrensis; Pisces; Sotalia Fluviatilis; Animal; Brasil; Catfishes; Dna, Mitochondrial; Dolphins; Fisheries; Food Analysis; Food Industry; Fraud; Gastrointestinal Contents; Rivers; Seafood; Sequence Analysis, Dna

The fishery for Calophysus macropterus, an Amazonian necrophagous catfish, is highly detrimental to river dolphins and caimans, which are deliberately killed for use as bait. In the Brazilian Amazon, this fishery has increased over the last decade, in spite of the rejection of scavenger fishes by Brazilian consumers. It was suspected that C. macropterus fillets were being sold in Brazilian markets, disguised as a fictitious fish (the "douradinha"). We collected 62 fillets from "douradinha" and other suspiciously named fish from 4 fish-processing plants sold at 6 markets in Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, and sequenced the cytochrome b gene to identify fillets to species. Sixty percent of fillets labeled "douradinha" or with other deceptive names were actually C. macropterus. Six other fish species of low commercial value were also found. The presence of dolphin tissue in the stomach contents of C. macropterus was confirmed by mtDNA control region sequencing. Our results formed the scientific basis for a moratorium on the fishing and fraudulent selling of C. macropterus, issued by the Brazilian Ministries of the Environment and Fisheries. Exposure of this fraud via the mass media can help end the illegal use of dolphins as bait in Brazil. © 2015 The American Genetic Association 2015. All rights reserved.