The Council of Agriculture and Keelung City Government yesterday released 210,000 fish at the city’s Bisha Port (碧沙漁港) to replenish local fisheries, but no Chinese officials showed up for the first time in three years for the annual event, even though it is part of a cross-strait fishery program.
Hundreds of elementary-school students carried buckets of juvenile fish to the shoreline and released them into the sea.
Other students boarded vessels that sailed toward Keelung Island to release the fish into deeper waters.
Photo: Lu Hsien-hsiu, Taipei Times
The Fisheries Agency said 10,000 Girella punctate, a native sea chub, and 200,000 yellowfin seabream, both commercially important species, were released.
Taiwan’s coastal fisheries resources have dramatically decreased due to human and natural factors, so the agency said it established fry-release programs to boost fishery resources, the agency said.
More than 50 million fish have been released over the past five years, it said.
“Species to be released must be appropriate to the local ecology, so the release will not damage the environment. We have always hoped that fish releases can help rebalance the marine ecosystem,” Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Chih-ching (陳志清) said at the event.
The fish release program is different from religious rituals involving the release of caged animals into the wild because the council says it only releases appropriate species in acceptable quantities.
As an example of what can go wrong with unsupervised releasees, red drums, a large carnivorous fish species originating in the Atlantic Ocean, can now be found along Taiwan’s northern coast, possibly because they were released during religious activities, and the invasive species has posed a great threat to native species, the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology said.
Religious groups should seek permission to release animals to prevent massive die-offs of the freed species as well as native species, Chen said.
Yesterday’s fish release was part of the government’s “Blue Economy Program,” which aims to establish a fishery belt off the nation’s coasts.
A similar event at Pingtung County’s Fenggang Fishing Harbor (楓港漁港) saw the release of 100,000 snubnose pompanos.
The Chinese officials who were supposed to attend the Keelung event blamed a scheduling conflict for their non-attendance, but their absence prompted speculation over whether their visit had been canceled because of next week’s presidential inauguration.
Chen refused to comment on their absence, but said the council would not be sending representatives to participate in a fish release event that is scheduled in China’s Fujian Province.
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