Ever stare at the neon tetras in a pet store and think, "I wonder what their commute to work was like"? Well, our colleagues at Planet Money did, and it turns out the answer is a canoe trip deep into the Brazilian Amazon - at least for some of them.

The fish in question is the cardinal tetra, a tiny, shimmering creature with a red stripe that has somehow convinced millions of people to buy glass boxes full of water and drop it in. For decades, the vast majority of these fish came from the wild, scooped up by fishermen like Valderas Siqueira near the town of Barcelos, Brazil - known, charmingly, as the ornamental fish capital of the country. On a good day, Siqueira hauls in 10,000 of the little squirming eyebrows, contributing to an annual take of at least 20 million cardinals, according to conservation biologist Scott Dowd.

"Twenty million's a wicked lot, as we say in Boston," Dowd told NPR, initially fearing the fishery was unsustainable. But research revealed that even that staggering number is just a drop in the bucket of the Amazon's cardinal tetra population. For a while, it was a rare good-news story from the Amazon: locals making a decent living without torching the rainforest. But now, Siqueira says orders are way down, and he's worried his job might vanish.

The culprit? Fish farms in Southeast Asia have cracked the code on breeding cardinal tetras in captivity, undercutting the wild-caught market. It's a classic globalization gut-punch - the same thing happened to Barcelos back when Europeans stole rubber trees and planted them in, you guessed it, Southeast Asia. But this time, the town is fighting back with a modern weapon: marketing.

Aramara Castro, a local fishbroker who calls herself a "proud warrior fisherwoman," is working with Dowd to help customers trace their fish back to the Amazon and meet the people who caught them. Their pitch: sure, the farmed fish might be cheaper, but can they tell a story about a canoe ride through a swamp? Probably not. In the cutthroat global economy, when someone can copy your product, the one thing they can't copy is your origin story - especially if it involves a guy flicking water with his fingers to lure fish into a net.