> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# On Maupiti, the breadfruit tells you which fish to eat
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/maupiti-breadfruit/
- Published: 2026-10-06T09:22:54.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T08:22:56.000Z
- Description: West of Bora Bora, a small island paired every fish with a breadfruit variety so each one got the rest of the year off, and a geographer and a Tahitian researcher have just written down what the islanders carved in stone.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories

Maupiti is the smallest high island in French Polynesia's Society group, a worn volcanic peak inside a pale lagoon west of Bora Bora, with about twelve hundred people along one coast road. Breadfruit, uru in Tahitian, is the staple, and the island once grew close to a hundred named varieties, each fruiting at a slightly different time, so that, as one islander put it, "we are never out of uru". By long custom several of the fish people catch most are each paired with one variety and eaten only with it: camouflage grouper with the Afara breadfruit, humpnose big eye bream with Hatuma, blacktail snapper with Puero, octopus with Pau. When a variety is out of season its fish is left alone, so every fish gets most of the year off. Geographer Russell Fielding of Coastal Carolina University and Fiona Gimenez of the Universite de la Polynesie Francaise visited in May 2024, interviewed sixteen residents, and have written the system up in the journal Geographical Review as a conservation plan hidden inside dinner.

Near Marae Vaiahu on the south coast stand nine carved stones, one for each district, with the district's plants above its name and its sea foods below. Jeffrey Tamati, the island's artist, conservationist and historian, led their making in 2009 so the island would remember. Elders told the researchers plainly how the pairings loosened: wartime cuttings carried down from the hills, power lines along the coast road, and imported rice, which goes with any fish. "God takes away the uru varieties we don't eat," one said; an island report counts 82 varieties in the past and 32 today. What holds is the island's habit of deciding for itself. In 2005, wary of what resorts had done to Bora Bora next door, Maupiti voted seventy percent against an 80 room luxury resort on one of its motus, and the only beds for visitors are still small family pensions. One Sunday a teenage girl gave the church's thanksgiving prayer from a pulpit carved with fish and breadfruit, and the almanac prints planting and fishing dates beside the daily readings. Fielding and Gimenez think a revival is likely: old varieties replanted, new pairings made, and a new set of stones carved.

![Maupiti from space, a green island inside a pale lagoon in deep blue ocean](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/10/maupiti-from-space-nasa.jpg)

Maupiti from the International Space Station: the island, its lagoon and the ring of motus. Image: NASA, public domain.

### Sources and links

Our short take: every fact above is from the open access paper by Russell Fielding and Fiona Gimenez in Geographical Review (vol 116, issue 3, 2026), which we read in full; the islanders' words are as the authors recorded them in May 2024.

- [The Sustainability Stones, Fielding and Gimenez, Geographical Review, 2026](https://doi.org/10.1080/00167428.2025.2469105) The paper, open access.
- [Open access copy at Ifremer's Archimer repository](https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00945/105666/) Free PDF.
- [Breadfruit, by Russell Fielding, Columbia University Press](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/breadfruit/9780231219075/) His book on the tree.
- [Maupiti, Tahiti Tourisme](https://tahititourisme.pf/en-pf/islands-and-archipelagos/the-society-islands/maupiti/) The island.