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World's ugliest fish threatened by greenhouse reform

The world's oldest, largest and arguably ugliest freshwater fish, already on the brink of extinction in North America, is now facing a new and highly unexpected threat to its survival in Canada -- the international Kyoto accord on the environment.

The agreement, to which Canada is a signatory, recently sparked a massive planning effort in this country to build more than 100 new hydroelectric dams in central and western parts of the country to generate cleaner energy and replace aging fossil-fuel-burning plants to meet Canada's reduced greenhouse-gas emissions target under Kyoto.

But these structures will cut off the armor-plated lake sturgeon -- which once swam in nearly every river and lake in North America, survived predation by dinosaurs and was a staple for local Aborigines for centuries -- from its breeding grounds as well as destroy its habitat, environmentalists said.

"It's a bizarre turn of events that this species is now connected to Kyoto," University of Manitoba zoologist Terry Dick said.

He has been trying in earnest to reintroduce the lake sturgeon into local rivers.

"It's a big problem because hydroelectric dams are primarily built on good spawning sites or nursery areas where the fish feed. It's going to be an issue in [the provinces of] Manitoba and Ontario where they're now looking at rivers where before they weren't going to have hydroelectric dams," he said.

These so-called living fossils can live to more than 100 years, weigh as much as 100kg and grow to more than 2m long. With elongated, cone-shaped snouts and rows of bony plates on their backside, the freaky fish are prized for their meat, eggs and oil.

But their numbers in western Canada have steadily declined over the past 150 years since the arrival of European settlers due to overfishing.

A century ago, Canadian fishermen netted millions of kilograms of lake sturgeon each year, stacking them like logs on lakeshores. Sightings of them nowadays are rare enough to make newspaper headlines, and scientists estimate that fewer than 1,000 are left in western Canadian rivers and lakes -- equal to the remaining number of plains bison that were once a symbol of Canada's vast prairies.

Plans to build three massive hydroelectric dams in the province of Manitoba and 100 or more smaller dams in Ontario over the next decade, all connected to a new east-west power grid to feed Canada's industrial base in Ontario, will quicken the fish's demise, observers fear.

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, tackling the issue a year ahead of originally planned after sensing some urgency, has declared the species endangered in western Canada and at risk in eastern Canada.

This follows similar actions in the US.
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