Penghu recently released 100,000 adult and 200,000 juvenile areola babylon sea snails into the waters off its coast in an effort to revive the local marine ecology, which was badly damaged by an unusually cold spell early this year.
The release was conducted at the end of last month, Huang Ting-shi, an assistant researcher at the Penghu Marine Biology Research Center, said yesterday.
Penghu suffered its worst fishery disaster in a century in February, when a two-week cold snap killed masses of fish and coral.
The cold, which scientists attributed to a cold water current from snow melting in China, caused fishery losses of NT$350 million (US$11 million) for the fishing-dependent county, a report in March by the county government said.
Fish farmers around the county lost 1,506 tonnes of fish, mostly valuable cobia and grouper, the report said.
Asked why shellfish rather than fish were chosen for the repopulation move, Huang said that the mollusks, which feed on decaying flesh, not only serve as cleaners but also as bait to attract other marine creatures.
The adult shellfish are expected to spawn between March and September next year, and the young, which feed on organic detritus, will attract crabs and octopus, which in turn will attract bigger fish, Huang said.
This way, the damaged marine food chain will gradually be restored to a balanced state, he said.
Moreover, Penghu has the country’s largest area of tidal flats perfect for creatures like shellfish and crabs, Huang said.
The areola babylon snails live on sandy and muddy sea bottoms in tropical and temperate zones at depths of 8m to 20m. In Taiwan, they are distributed along the southwest coast and are a major fishery resource.
Taiwan has suffered a drop in numbers of the shellfish in recent years and has to import from other countries. The retail price can reach as high as NT$450 per kilo, the Penghu County Government said in a press release.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater