This is Part IX of New Worlder’s first series: Food & The Amazon Rainforest, which explores the relationships and possibilities surrounding food in one of the most diverse and vulnerable ecosystems on Earth.

Santiago Alves was a paiche hunter. Also called pirarucu in other parts of the region, paiche (arapaima gigas) is the world’s second largest freshwater fish after the Beluga Sturgeon and it lives in the shallow, muddy waters of riverbeds in the Amazon basin. Marine scientists consider the paiche to be a direct link to the Miocene epoch millions of years ago and it has a bone structure unlike any other fish you will find, which makes breaking down an entire paiche in the kitchen (which is rare anyway) incredibly difficult.

Traditionally, Amazonian communities usually salt and sun-dry paiche flesh, like bacalao, which can be taken into the forest or rolled up and shopped to markets. It gets chopped up and steamed inside of a bijao leaf with rice or yuca for juanes, or gets re-hydrated in stews. It’s bony tongue is often used for grating guaraná that’s then mixed with water to kill intestinal worms, while the scales can be used as nail files.

The flavor of the firm, white-fleshed fish is similar to Chilean sea bass or halibut. It contains high levels of collagen, which helps it develop a nice crust when it is cooked and it has no traces of mercury or other heavy metals commonly found in fish of comparable size. Every 100 grams of meat provides 20 grams of protein. Once word got out, paiche was an easy sell.

In Peru’s Pacaya Samiria reserve, Alves and other fishermen would take pull out 100 to 120 paiche a night. Up to three meters in length and 250 kilograms in weight, paiche need to come up for air every 15-20 minutes, making them easy to catch with a net or harpoon. The fishermen would remove the filets and toss out the rest. There were bans on paiche fishing, but they were ignored. It seemed as if there was enough paiche to go around forever, until there wasn’t.

“It’s the sad reality of our life,” he told me. “No one respected the bans, they killed at will.”

Hunters like him would export paiche by other names to avoid fines. Just as a real market began to appear for paiche, the fish began to disappear from Amazonian waterways in the 1970s.

The paiche is a predator, eating smaller fish and crustaceans. While it may seem counter intuitive, predators are an important part of a healthy ecosystem, particularly one as complex as the Amazon basin with around 2,200 fish, not to mention countless crustaceans, reptiles, amphibians, insects, mammals, and aquatic plants. The predators exploit prey species by eating the old, injured, and sick, which leaves more food for other animals and encourages healthier prey populations as only the fittest animals are left to reproduce. Without paiche in Amazonian waterways, the entire food chain is threatened.

When there were too few paiche in the wild, Alves turned to aquaculture out of necessity. In the 1980s, he began farm raising paiche outside of Iquitos. Everyone thought he was crazy to try and breed these enormous fish in captivity. His low impact farm, called Piscigranja Arapaima Gigas, now covers 18 hectares and encompasses several large lakes filled with thousands of paiche, as well as zarapatera, a prehistoric looking turtle species. Capybaras and peccaries scuttle about along the shorelines, and a tapir is kept in a large enclosure in the back of the property.

On weekends Alves opens his pavilion beside the lakes to the public, cooking the critters he raises over wood fire grills. The 20 kilo zarapatera are cut up and its meat and blood is cooked in the shell with sachaculantro and ají charapita. The paiche, butchered just after being pulled from the water tastes like a different fish altogether. The meat, with blood still in its veins, is richer and tastier than the frozen fillets served in most places. It’s more black cod than sea bass.

Alves was the first to begin exporting the fish to Asia and now ships paiche around the world. He claims to sells 6,000 kilos of paiche a month, though with investment he thinks he could sell 100,000 kilos. He owns 11 million hectares of land along the Río Tigre and says he could repopulate the entire Amazon with paiche if the government support him.

Alves claims that he was one of the biggest predators in the Amazon. He grew up hunting whatever he saw and he chopping down the tallest trees for wood. There were no laws against it. He was the worse of the worst. He knows that now.

Inadvertently, Alves has become a symbol for the conservation of the species. Farmed paiche has taken pressure off of wild populations. More and consumers within Peru and elsewhere in the Amazon are aware of the threats to wild paiche, and demands for more transparency have helped allow NGOs to move in and help manage the fisheries. In parts of the Peruvian Amazon where paiche have been MIA for decades, they are now flourishing.

“Salvemos el hambre del mundo,” Alves says. We can save the hunger of the world.