BACKGROUND: Traditional fishing communities are strongholds of ethnobiological knowledge but establishing to what degree they harbor cultural consensus about different aspects of this knowledge has been a challenge in many ethnobiological studies. METHODS: We conducted an ethnobiological study in an artisanal fishing community in northeast Brazil, where we interviewed 91 community members (49 men and 42 women) with different type of activities (fishers and non-fishers), in order to obtain free lists and salience indices of the fish they know. To establish whether there is cultural consensus in their traditional knowledge on fish, we engaged a smaller subset of 45 participants in triad tasks where they chose the most different fish out of 30 triads. We used the similarity matrices generated from the task results to detect if there is cultural consensus in the way fish were classified by them. RESULTS: The findings show how large is the community's knowledge of fish, with 197 ethnospecies registered, of which 33 species were detected as salient or important to the community. In general, men cited more fish than women. We also found that there was no cultural consensus in the ways fish were classified. CONCLUSIONS: Both free-listing and triad task methods revealed little cultural consensus in the way knowledge is structured and how fish were classified by community members. Our results suggest that it is prudent not to make assumptions that a given local community has a single cultural consensus model in classifying the organisms in their environment.

Centre for Rainforest Studies The School for Field Studies Yungaburra QLD 4884 Australia

Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Sciences College of Science and Engineering James Cook University 14 88 McGregor Rd Smithfield QLD 4878 Australia

Department of Anthropology Faculty of Science Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Institute of Biology Federal University of Bahia Brazil R Barão de Jeremoabo 668 Salvador BA 840170 115 Brazil

Knowledge Technology and Innovation Group Wageningen University and Research Wageningen The Netherlands

National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution Federal University of Bahia Salvador Brazil

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