Mollusc Gathering in Tropical Regions of Brazil

Abstract

Gathering bivalve molluscs is an important part of extractive fishing activities in the northeastern region of Brazil and is performed mainly by women. This study addresses the invisibility of the activity despite the labor effort and income generation these women represent. Depending on the community, these fisherwomen either practice all steps of the activity or only some processes, such as preparing and selling the product, but are always involved in some part of the productive process. Despite participating in the generation of income, the work of these mollusc gatherers is considered invisible, without prestige and given little or no value when compared to other fishing activities, especially those exercised by men. Mollusc gathering may seem to be a non-complex practice, but requires a variety of traditional knowledge that is passed from one generation to the next. Such knowledge reflects the intimate understanding these workers have of productive processes and the environmental dynamics of coastal artisanal fishing. In the majority of traditional communities, the difficulties lead to the discouragement of this activity as work for future generations. Thus, there is a need for the recognition of the spaces of female mollusc gatherers, considering the relations between the need for economic production and social reproduction with the egalitarian representation of these workers in the entities of social representation of the class of fishers.

Spatiotemporal analysis of the genetic and morphological variation of Iphigenia brasiliensis (Mollusca: Bivalvia) from the southwest tropical Atlantic

“…Impacts on commercially important bivalve population sizes due to overexploitation have been described in the literature for commercially exploited bivalve species (Blaber et al 2000, Coleman & Williams 2002, Bhattacharya & Sarkar 2003, as is the case of I. brasiliensis (Teixeira & Campos 2019). The commercial exploitation of bivalve species is seasonal and can be very intense at certain times of the year due to the time of maturation and growth (Katsanevakis et al 2008, Hausmann & Meredith-Williams 2017.…”

“…Bivalve mollusks have a wide geographic distribution, occupy a relatively wide range of environmental conditions, and are relatively abundant (Simpson & Harnik 2009, Lorion et al 2010, besides being animals of commercial importance for coastal communities (Krause et al 2019, Olivier et al 2020. The southwest tropical region of the Atlantic Ocean, especially on the Brazilian coast, is home to great biodiversity of bivalves (Soares et al 2011), such as the species of bivalve mollusks Anomalocardia flexuosa, Crassostrea rhizophorae, and Iphigenia brasiliensis (Nascimento et al 1980, Maia et al 2018, Teixeira & Campos 2019. Anomalocardia brasiliana is an exclusively Brazilian species that has been studied since the 1970s in different approaches (Narchi 1972b, Mouëza et al 1999, Arruda et al 2009, Silva-Cavalcanti & Costa 2011, Corte et al 2017, similar to the species Crassostrea rhizophorae (Martino & Cruz 2004, Freitas et al 2006, Leal et al 2008, Kanhai et al 2014.…”