Much to the delight of local preservationists, efforts to establish a second natural breeding ground for the endangered Formosan landlocked salmon have met success, Shei-Pa National Park Administration said.
Liao Lin-yen (廖林彥), director of the park’s Wuling Formosan Landlocked Salmon Conservation Center, said that after it released 250 Formosan landlocked salmon bred in captivity into the Luoyewei Stream (羅葉尾溪) and Sijielan Stream (司界蘭溪) last June, 28 salmon had been spawned.
SPAWNING GROUNDS
“We have found eight spawning grounds along the Luoyewei Stream and four spawning grounds in the Sijielan Stream,” he said. “A total of 28 fish have so far been spawned.”
The discovery indicates that captive-bred rare salmon can naturally breed after being released into the wild, Liao said, adding that the center has spent about 17 years to achieve this goal.
Encouraged by the results, Liao said, the park administration is scheduled to release up to 1,000 salmon parr in both streams on May 22 in hopes of establishing them as a second natural habitat for the Formosan landlocked salmon — a holdover from the last Ice Age and considered one of Taiwan’s national treasures — within five years.
TRADITIONAL HABITAT
Work by the conservation center has also boosted the number of Formosan landlocked salmon in the Cijiawan Creek (七家灣溪) — its traditional habitat — from slightly more than 200 in 1995 to more than 4,000 now.
The conservation center has not released captive-bred salmon parr in the river since 2006 and has instead launched a “take young salmon home” program, Liao said.
Under the project, Liao said, the center set up a “species bank” for the Formosan landlocked salmon and began releasing salmon fry into streams where the species had been found in the past.
DIFFICULTIES
Initially, the program achieved little success, Liao said.
The center released 1,500 salmon parr into three streams near the Cijiawan Creek four years ago, but most of them were washed away during typhoons before they could spawn.
A field survey found that larger volumes of water brought by typhoons as a result of global warming were having a negative impact on the species’ breeding, Liao said.
“We then decided to release salmon parr into other branches of the creek that are linked to deeper ponds and have more stable water flow,” Liao said, adding that this new approach had paid off.
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
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
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