The Guardian reports that the arapaima, a giant river fish of the Amazon and today’s Endangered All-Star, is believed to be in danger of extinction, owing to errors in classification. A new study from the Journal of Applied Ichthyology finds that there are four or more subspecies of the fish, rather than a single one. The status of the various subspecies is unknown, and scientists suggest that one may be recovering while others go extinct. One of the authors of the study, Leandro Castello of the Woods Hole Research Centre in Falmouth, Massachusetts, pointed to the fish’s great size as a drawback, leaving it vulnerable to gill nets and harpoons. He told the Guardian: “They have the curse of being tasty and of having to breathe air.”
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