Pirarucu

A great example of a mythologised animal calendar marker. This one is from Amazonia and the animal is paiche (Pirarucu) fish...

Watson Flores carries the paiche (Pirarucu) from the canoe to the shore (Credit: Manuel Vazquez). From "The Amazon's colossal prehistoric fish"..

This amazing fish can weigh up to 200kg and grow up to 3m long. It belongs to the family Arapaimidae (Osteoglossidae), a group of bony fish that have existed since the early Cretaceous period (65 to 136 million years ago)...

According to a Brazilian legend, once there was a ruthless warrior named Pirarucu, who, due to his cruelty, was damned by gods to be preyed upon by storms, thunder and lightning. He hid himself in the river where he eventually morphed into a giant fish with thick red scales...

Now in many of my previous posts about mythologised animal calendar markers, I explained that they all started as a well known animal annual lifecycle event, mating, birthing, migration...

Which, if it overlapped with some significant annual climatic or agricultural event, was originally used to mark that event. In this case we have the spawning season of the Arapaima gigas (Pirarucu) which overlaps with the start of the rain season in Amazonia...

This is the climate chart for the Amazonia. You can see that the rains (and thunders and lightning) arrive in Oct/Nov...From "Assessment of the total lightning flash rate density (FRD) in northeast Brazil (NEB) based on TRMM orbital data from 1998 to 2013"

Which is exactly when paiche (Pirarucu) start spawning. The spawning is preceded by elaborate courtship that can last several days, consisting of the swimming in pairs, circling, chasing each other in the flood shallows. Not something you would miss...From "Reproductive aspects of the Amazon giant paiche (Arapaima gigas): a review"

And so, eventually, like everywhere else, the origin of the animal calendar marker was forgotten, and we were left with the myth about the eternal damnation of the Pirarucu to be preyed upon by storms, thunder and lightning...

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...