Um século de caça comercial na Amazônia

Abstract

Amazonia is one of the last frontiers for the conservation and the sustainable use of wildlife. However, our understanding on the factors that determine the resilience of game species to the harvest has been studied restrictedly on time and space. From unpublished recent documentary evidence on the international trade in Amazonian animal hides, such as commercial records and cargo manifests, we performed the first study covering both wide spatial and time ranges, and highlight diverse gaps about this episode of the Amazonian historical ecology. At the first chapter, recently published at Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (Ciências Humanas), we describe as important international economic-political events influenced on demand for Amazonian animal hides. This trade grew gradually after the rubber collapse (1912), then spiked between mid-1930s and the II World War, declined somewhat after the war, reviving again in the 1960s until the sign of the Brazilian Fauna Protected Law (1967) and CITES (1975), which theoretically should be halted this trade, but it persisted while there was international demand for Amazonian hides. In the second chapter, we investigate signs of overharvest using trend analysis on time series spanning 66 years for each of the 19 target-species. Conservatively, over 20 million animals were killed for their hides from central-western Brazilian Amazon. Accessibility of habitats, as well as the heightened vulnerability of social and diurnal species, appear to be as important as standard biological parameters such as reproductive rate and carrying capacity in predicting harvest resilience in Amazonia. Rivers and floodplains were easily accessible to hunters while the forested interior was not, providing most terrestrial species with adequate refugia to sustain commercial harvest. At the third chapter, we highlighted the east-west gradients in abundances of the white-lipped peccary, collared peccary and red-brocket deer throughout the Amazon. These spatial distribution on ungulate abundances are highly predicted by similar gradient in soil fertility. However, hunting intensity surpasses soil fertility in predict the resilience of more vulnerable species to the commercial hunting, such as the white-lipped peccary. The relevance of our founds shows the importance of the most recent historical ecology to the debate on the historical human influence over the Amazonia, improving our understanding on their variable exploitation capacity and finally providing guidelines for the conservation and sustainable use of the Amazonian wildlife.