A National Tsing Hua University professor and four students are helping fish in the Shangping River (上坪溪) breed, because a weir that was built too high is blocking their migration to lay eggs.
Biologist Tzeng Chyng-shyang (曾晴賢) discovered that Taiwan shovel-jaw carp in the river have been unable to swim toward cooler water after a weir built for the Second Baoshan Reservoir (寶二水庫) was built too high at 7.74m.
During nighttime trips, Tzeng and his students have netted about 200 fish and carried them over the two-story-high weir.
Photo: Huang Mei-chu, Taipei Times
Shovel-jaw carps like cold water and they breed once a year, with female fish carrying about 1,200 eggs at a time, Tzeng said on Friday last week.
The fish can survive in fresh water up to 25?C when they are mature, but for breeding they require water of 15?C or colder, he said.
Biologists view their presence in a river to be an indication of how clean the water is, since the diatom algae they eat need clean water to grow, he said.
“We cannot simply worry about endangered species. The diversity in our ecosystems is shrinking, and fish species that can normally live 10 years are now living for only two or three years,” he said.
Two threats facing shovel-jaw carps are people fishing for them during their breeding season and a warming of the waters where they normally breed, he said.
An increase in water temperature of just 2?C cuts the success rate of breeding from 100 percent to 60 percent, he said.
The Water Resources Agency built a channel to allow fish to get around the weir, but it is some distance from the main river bed and fish near the bottom of the wier are unable to locate it, he said.
The fish that gather there try to jump over the wier, but it is too tall and many fish die from slamming into the wier wall, he said, adding that fish are often unable to use the channel after heavy rains, which disrupt normal water flow.
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