Baniwa fishers share the Içana River with giant otters

On the Içana River in Brazil's upper Rio Negro, Baniwa fishers and giant otters hunt the same dark water, and most of the fishers do not try to drive the otters off. Mongabay reported on October 29, 2026, on a study led by ecologist Natalia Camps Pimenta. She and her colleagues interviewed 19 fishers in seven communities along the middle Içana, inside the Upper Rio Negro Indigenous Land. In the dry season, 84 percent said they regularly meet otters while fishing. Only 32 percent described them as competitors. Nearly two thirds said they change spots, wait for the otters to leave, or quiet the boat.

The diets only partly overlap. People favor medium and large fish. Giant otters and neotropical otters eat mostly smaller ones. Giant otters often use shallow streams and tend to retreat from paddles and engines. Groups run to about nine to twelve animals. For many Baniwa, the giant otter is a pajé of the waters, a guardian whose presence means fish are there and looked after. A fisherman in Tucumã Rupitá told researchers the otters belong to that place. An elders' creation account, published in 2017 and cited by Mongabay, puts otters among the beings who ran into the river and became its shamans.

The relationship was broken and then rebuilt. In the 1950s and 1960s a commercial fur trade paid hunters for skins, and giant otters collapsed across the Amazon, including here. Brazil's 1967 fauna law and, later, the demarcation of Indigenous land in the 1990s helped the animals return. Elders linked the otters' absence with fewer fish, and their return with fish coming back. Pimenta said coexistence here is not only a belief. It is also history, rules, and the habit of using a scarce river in a way that leaves room. The study is those 19 interviews and that history. It is not a new count of otters on the Içana.