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It's a disturbing experience - seeing something that doesn't exist.
In July 1993 I was floating in a leaky wooden canoe on a muddy Amazon lake, known simply as Lago Grande (big lake), looking for arapaima. Unusually for a fish, Arapaima gigas is an air-breather. Despite having gills, it has to surface at half-hour intervals to burp stale air from its swim bladder and gulp a fresh mouthful down. It's a quirk that allows these super-predators to stay active in stagnant water, when other fish are going belly-up. And without doubt it's one of the reasons they grow so huge. Just how huge is not known for sure, but they are commonly said to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world, with some supposedly reliable sources quoting a maximum length of fifteen feet. So they shouldn't be too hard to spot, particularly as they're also not exactly camouflaged, being decorated all over with vivid red markings. So why hadn't I seen a single one?
Perhaps they had all been harpooned or netted - the one drawback to being so large and visible. But local fishermen assured me that there were still arapaima in the lake, mainly because there's a very deep hole, over seventy-five feet deep, off the southern end of the central island where their encircling nets can't reach the bottom. A few days before, Jose had even pointed some out to me:
'There! The size of this canoe! …'