Is there mercury in the fish we eat? Amazonians tap WhatsApp to find out
In the photo taken with his phone, Takakudjyti Kayapó holds a round-bellied silver matrinxã fish in front of his chest, the fingers of his left hand wrapped around the base of its tail and the fingers of his right securing its head.
He's sitting in the stern of a simple white aluminum motorboat, floating along the calm waters of the Curuaés, a river known to his people as the Pixaxá. It runs along the western edge of two Mebêngôkre Kayapó territories, located in the Brazilian Amazon state of Pará and providing a handful of villages on its edge with fish to eat, water to drink and a place to wash and bathe.
That day in April, the Indigenous man, better known as Takakre, took to the river at dawn. As he glided along the tree-lined water, the air hot and damp despite the early hour, he asked a fellow resident of Mopkrore, the riverside village where he lives, to take the photo with the matrinxã.
Farther upstream, he took a selfie. fish with a black stripe across its middle dangled from a line he held up to his face.
