User:BaduFerreira/Igarapé

Igarapé do Mestre Chico in Manaus

An Igarapé is a first, second, or third order Amazonian watercourse, consisting of a long river arm or channel. There are a large number of them in the Amazon Basin, with Igarapés representing up to 90% of the entire length of the waterways in some drainage basins. They are characterized by their shallowness and for running almost inside the forest. Only small vessels, such as canoes and small boats, can navigate the waters of an igarapé, due to its shallow depth and narrowness.

Etymology

Igarapé in the Chapada das Mesas National Park, in Maranhão, Brazil

The word was adopted into Brazilian Portuguese from the Tupi language. It literally means "canoe path", as it is the combination of the words "ygara" (canoe) and "apé" (path).

Characteristics

Many igarapés have dark waters similar to those of the Rio Negro, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon River, because of sediment flowing downriver. They are navigable by small boats and canoes and play an important role as transportation and communication routes.

The igarapés are an integral and essential part of the ecosystem of the Amazon rainforest because they function as ecological corridors, which connect forest fragments and facilitate the movement of fauna and the gene flow between animal and plant populations. They represent a major source of diversity in the region as individual nearby igarapés can contain completely different aquatic fauna from another and contain up to 50 different varieties of native fish species.