No more boto butchery. Brazil has banned a catfish fishery that relied on killing river dolphins for bait. The country will use genetic tests to enforce the ban.
For eight years Brazilian fishers have been catching catfish called piracatinga commercially. To lure these “vulture catfish,” they illegally kill and cut up pink river dolphins or “boto,” a second species of river dolphin called tucuxi and crocodile-like caimans. All three have suffered steep population declines. At one site on the Solimoes river, researchers recorded a 50 percent drop in boto numbers since 2004.
Footage of a dolphin mother and her unborn infant being cut up and used as bait, shown on television, provoked outrage.
