The deaths of a large amount of coral and deep sea fish off the coast of Green Island (綠島) over the past month remains a mystery, members of a special team in charge of the probe said yesterday.
The special team was formed by the Eastern Coastal Patrol Office, the Taitung County Government's fishery office and the Lutao township office, after residents on Green Island, better known locally as Lutao (
To date, no definitive cause for the massive die-off has been identified.
Seeking answers, the team will conduct further toxicity tests on sea water taken from the beach where dead fish have been found, research team members said.
It has been established that the deaths were not caused by illegal fishing and that many of the fish had empty stomachs when they died.
The findings have added to the mystery following laboratory tests that failed to find harmful bacteria in tissue samples taken from the suddenly stricken fish.
Green Island, off the southeastern coast of Taiwan, has never experienced such a massive fish die-off, Lutao Township chief Chen Chia-wen (
At first, island residents would pick up the fish, mostly from valuable species such as groupers and parrot fish, and take them home to eat, but stopped doing so after the dead fish continued to wash ashore, Chen said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
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The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
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