Congo Killies - PageSuite

Adult Panaque
cochliodon from San
Martin de Loba.
Poison
I wanted to seek out Antonio’s fisherman contact right
away the next morning. We made our way through narrow
alleys, inquired all over the place, and eventually
found his house a long way outside of town. I don’t think
he recognized me any more, but he knew Antonio, who
had regularly purchased his fishes for 15 years. When I
asked him about cuchas de ojo azul, he looked at me and
said only that it would be easier to win the lottery than to
find a cucha—there were none left and he had long since
given up looking for them, since the “American millionaire
had poisoned everything.”
When I heard that, I was more than a little surprised,
because even Antonio knew nothing about it.
The fisherman told us that a little over 12 years ago, an
American was there visiting with his daughter. She was
stung by a freshwater ray while swimming and fell into
a coma. Her father thought he was going to lose his only
child, and wanted to avenge her. He had experts develop
a poison that would sink immediately in the water and
kill the bottom-dwelling fishes—that is, the rays he
hated. Tons of it were tipped into the upper course of
the Magdalena and killed thousands of stingrays, as well
as everything else that lived on the bottom, including
the Blue-Eyed Plecs and seven or eight other loricariid
species.
Local fishermen kept trying to catch cuchas de ojos
azul for around two years, but without success. They gave
This stingray is Potamotrygon magdalenae (Dumeril,
1865), a common species that may have triggered
the environmental vandalism in the Magdalena.
We also caught this ray. Is it a variant
of P. magdalenae or a new species
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