The Fisheries Agency yesterday announced the success of the world’s first-ever program to cultivate a hard-to-catch native sea chub, as part of a program to restore and establish a fishery belt off the nation’s northeastern coast.
Agency Director Tsay Tzu-yaw (蔡日耀) told a press conference in Taipei that the Girella punctata is a rarely caught species because of its preferred habitat — the rocky coast of northeastern Taiwan which is frequented by heavy waves.
The fish, which can be captured only by angling, is known for its high economic value, retailing for about NT$700 to NT$1,000 (US$21.3 to US$30.5) per kilogram, Tsay said, adding that the fish holds great potential to be widely cultivated like the grouper due to its cost-efficiency and multiple applications.
The Girella punctata feeds solely on algae, making it more cost-efficient than other species that feed on small ocean fish whose stock has dropped because of overfishing, Tsay said.
It is also more sustainable and environmentally friendly, he said.
The species is a coldwater fish and can live in water temperatures below 10°C, making it a better companion in orient clam culture ponds, which requires algae-eating fish to clean the living environment and prevent diseases, than milkfish, which could easily die in large numbers in winter, he said.
The agency set up a research team in cooperation with National Taiwan University and National Taiwan Ocean University and spent seven years collecting about 700 Girella punctata as fishstock to breed about 20,000 fish, Tsay said.
About 10,000 fish are now kept in a sea farm in Penghu County, and the agency plans to release 5,000 adult fish this month off Taiwan’s northeastern coast and a total of about 200,000 fish in the next four years to replenish the fishery resources in the region, he said.
Minister of Agriculture Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) said the Council of Agriculture has established a “blue economic development” program with the National Science Council and earmarked NT$470 million (US$14.448 million) in the next four years to develop the aquaculture industry, as fish supply become more dependent on aquaculture than wild fish owing to climate change.
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:
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