About 100,000 juvenile flower crabs on Thursday were released off Penghu County’s Dacang (大倉) islet by the local branch of the Fisheries Research Institute.
The release of the young crabs, about 1cm wide, seeks to address a significant decline in their population amid overfishing.
Adult crabs are easy to catch and process, and are regarded as a delicacy, which makes them profitable for commercial fishers.
Photo courtesy of the Penghu Marine Biology Research Center
To tackle the overfishing problem, the institute has been releasing hundreds of thousands of juvenile crabs off Penghu every year. It has also sought to improve and expand their habitat by restoring the marine environment.
Institute director Justin Hsieh (謝恆毅) said the branch has planted seagrass of the Halodule uninervis, Nanozostera japonica, Halophila ovalis and other species on 5,000m2 of seabed off Penghu, helping crabs hide from predators.
The seagrass bed is rich in organic detritus, and small animals such as skeleton shrimps and juvenile mollusks feed on epiphytic algae growing on its leaves, he said, adding that juvenile crabs feed on those small animals.
The releases have been welcomed by local residents concerned about the decline in crab populations near Penghu.
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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