SÃO JOÃO DA PONTA, Brazil — On a sweltering morning, Ivone and Iza Farias load their handmade crabbing traps into their boat and set off along the Mocajuba River in the Amazonian mangroves of northern Brazil. The motor’s rattle drowns out the hum of cicadas and trills of birds as they glide down the still estuary. One by one, Iza tosses the baited traps into the water by the riverbank as the boat chugs along. “This is our supermarket,” she tells Mongabay, gesturing toward the spindly roots stretched into the water. “This is where our money comes from. This is where everything we have comes from.” The shellfish gatherers circle back and guide the boat toward the submerged traps, pulling them out of the water in hope of finding a crab inside. They keep the large crabs and toss back the small ones. Harvesting the crabs this way, along with practices like not fishing during the crabs’ breeding season, helps preserve the population. Sisters Ivone and Iza live in the São João da Ponta Extractive Reserve, a protected area that balances the needs of traditional communities and wildlife conservation by allowing sustainable, small-scale extractive practices, such as hunting, fishing and harvesting. It’s one of 23 protected areas overlapping the world’s largest continuous belt of mangroves that covers the Amazonian coast of Brazil’s Amapá, Pará and Maranhão states. In the past two decades, Brazil has lost 20% of its mangrove cover. Extractive reserves play a crucial role in mitigating the significant…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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