Fish of Brazil

The Amazon basin alone concentrates a diversity no other river system knows. The flood cycle organises all of it: each year the water invades the forest for kilometres and the fish scatter into it to feed, before concentrating in the channels as the level drops. That falling water opens the best fishing of the year.

The Pantanal, an immense wetland in the centre-west, works on the same principle at another scale. Its seasonal flooding makes it one of the largest freshwater nurseries on the planet, and fishing there follows the calendar of the water strictly.

The Atlantic coast, thousands of kilometres long, runs from subtropical water in the south to equatorial warmth in the north. Estuaries, mangroves, beaches and reefs follow one another, with a fauna that shifts markedly from north to south.