Where forest and the sea meet, tropical life comes alive down to its roots. These kilometres of mangrove of Peru and Ecuador are where fish, crabs, and seashells are born, as well as a network to preserve them. They’re fish, crab and conch fishers. The Pacific runs through their veins. Through their roots, an ancestral bond. This is the fight that they share to preserve the forests where their lives were found.
Santiago Aguayo, a 75-year-old crab fisherman with wrinkles in his face, recognizes himself as the first defender of the mangroves. Even if, for decades alongside his grandfather, his father, and his son, he was also one of its predators.
“We killed small crabs and female crabs. We extracted up to 200 a day. By 2003 we had exhausted everything” he says as he wraps his fingers in black fabric, his makeshift gloves. It is noon and Santiago’s day in the mangrove ends with a couple of crabs in his net. To capture them he employs nature’s most ancient technique: sticking his hands in the mud. “By feeling them we can tell if it’s a small crab, we touch it but we won’t extract it”. His hands, weathered by 45 years of salt water, are still agile but don’t catch more than what is allowed.
“We proposed the bans (close season) ourselves and established a limit per fisher. Each person can catch up to 96 crabs a day, that is our arrangement to preserve them.”
Before the 80s, when the ‘crab boom’ started north of Peru, Tumbes’ mangroves made up a huge forest of more than 28,000 hectares. It’s been 30 years since the National Sanctuary was created to protect the 2,000 hectares that remain.
The Sanctuary extends through Zarumilla, next to the Gulf of Guayaquil. In this neighboring district, where drinking water can often only be found in cisterns, some merchants still sell mangrove species during closure season.
Once a year, there’s closure season for black conchs. During these 45 days, their extraction, sale and consumption are banned across Peru. But it’s not 100% effective. “We can’t control everyone,” admits Wilfredo Infante, president of the “Los Tumpis” association.
In these mangroves there are those who respect it and those who don’t. A year ago, the first ones created the “Northeast Mangroves,” a consortium of 6 fisher associations committed to conservation. By mid-December, they achieved that, for the first time in the country, the National Service for State-Protected Natural Areas (SERNANP in Spanish) would sign an agreement to manage the forest with them.
“We live from the mangrove, we have to take care of it. If we don’t do it ourselves, the main beneficiaries, who will?” says Wilfredo.
After 27 years in the mangrove, today Wilfredo just extracts the conchs that are over 4 centimeters and a half. “A smaller one won’t reproduce. We have to leave them as to not alter the ecosystem,” he says.
North of the Gulf of Guayaquil, in the Mangrove Wildlife Haven “El Morro,” Karen Cruz dives with all her strength deep into the ocean to fish “pata de mula” conchs. It’s only 10 a.m. and deep down there, when holding your breath couldn’t be any harder, she couldn’t feel more free.
“You have to have a good breath to pick conchs,” Karen says, who learned to dive when she was 15 with her father. “He taught me to fish and to take care of the mangrove. He didn’t want me to depend on a man,” she points out.
At 28 years of age, Karen has lived all of her life in “El Morro,” a small town of 2,000 people surrounded by beautiful mangroves, 102 kilometres outside Guayaquil in Ecuador. Her love for these trees was born when she was a kid, but when she split up with the father of her two children, she became their defender.
“The mangrove is my life, all my youth and strength. It’s adorable. It feeds me every day, to feed my children. I can love the mangrove until I die because I has given me everything I didn’t have when I was married,” she says.
In this small Ecuadorian town, in which 80% of the population dedicates to fishing, very few women are autonomous. Here is where, day after day, Karen avoids sexist comments for her job.
“They say I act like a man because I spend a lot of time at sea. Here, sexism is more common than what a woman would want,” she explains. It’s Saturday, and even if it’s not a work day, she’s here at the mangrove with her mom and her small children.
To get where she and her mother get the conchs and the fish, they rent a canoe for 5 dollars which they use to row for an hour in the Pacific. Everyday, they work in three tides, where the waves rise and fall, to raise 35 dollars.
“Work is not hard, what’s hard is to leave my kids. I bring them only when the tide’s like this,” Karen says as she watches her kids play in a near infinite sea of shells coming out of the beach. She looks like she could find in them the air she misses when she’s diving. “My wish is to have my own house to raise my children,” she expresses.
In the Ecuadorian coastline, fishers like her know the ‘60s crab boom’ very well. Promoted through business deals, it transformed the mangrove into a breeding ground for this crustacean. While traversing it, the remnants are visible: crab farms, one after another, stand tall among what’s left of the mangrove.
Twelve years ago, fishers decided to fight for this forest. In partnerships, they asked Ecuador’s Environment Ministry to declare the mangrove as a protected area. In 2007, the entire 10,130.16 hectares of the mangrove were included to be protected in the Mangrove Wildlife Haven “El Morro.”
Now when Karen describes herself she calls herself a fisher, and a mother too. Maybe due to humility, she forgets to mention that she’s one of these mangrove’s staunchest defenders. “I don’t like it when they cut the mangrove. I’m fighting to protect it.”
It’s worth it to remember the mangroves, to have a mental image of what they are to understand that the job being done today by Peru and Ecuador’s artisanal fishers has immeasurable value for the future.
Through the Coastal Fisheries Initiative (CFI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), in an alliance with Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) these fishers will be vital allies of Peruvian and Ecuadorian authorities to achieve fishing that allows resource recovery, gives value to biodiversity and generates more sustainable jobs.
“We want to strengthen the relationship between local populations and authorities to make them feel welcome in the decision-making process, because they’re the ones who live there and are the ones who are going to suffer the consequences of bad management,” Mariano Valverde, CFI coordinator, said.
These conch and crab fishers will see in a few years that their struggle, to save their only way of life, was worth it.
© 2026 PNUD Perú
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