Faced with a looming ferocious summer with little rain forecast, the New South Wales government has embarked on a Noah’s Ark type operation to move native fish from the Lower Darling River — part of Australia’s most significant river system — to safe havens before high temperatures return to the already stressed river basin.
Researchers have warned of other alarming ecological signs that the river is in a dire state, following last summer’s mass fish kills.
Fran Sheldon, a professor at Griffith University’s Australian Rivers Institute, said only one surviving colony of river mussels had been found along the river and there were signs that river red gums were under severe stress.
“If the river red gums die, and some are hundreds of years old, there will be a domino effect. Banks will collapse, there will be massive erosion and it will send sediments down the river,” she said. “These sort of ecological collapses are much harder and expensive to reverse.”
The government last week announced an A$10 million (US$6.9 million) rescue package to mitigate the effects of the river crisis on native fish this summer.
New South Wales Minister for Agriculture Adam Marshall said the unprecedented action would provide “a lifeline for key native species ahead of an expected summer of horror fish kills.”
“We’re staring down the barrel of a potential fish Armageddon, which is why we’re wasting little time rolling out this unprecedented action,” Marshall said. “By starting this operation today we’re getting on the front foot while we still have the chance to rescue and relocate as many fish as possible.”
In December last year and January fish began dying in their hundreds of thousands in the far west of the state at Menindee, leaving weirs and waterholes carpeted with dead fish.
While fish deaths have occurred in the past, the scale was unprecedented and stunned Australians.
Several scientific reports said the lack of flow in the river due to the drought and exacerbated by irrigation upstream were to blame.
However, there are already doubts about how effective the A$10 million program will be. The unprecedented operation aims to move as many fish as possible from 15 to 20 priority waterholes in a two-week period, including Murray cod, some of which are at least 25 years old, golden perch and other rare species.
Boats with electrostatic fishing equipment will be used to stun the fish in weir pools and waterholes along the Darling at Menindee, where they will scooped up and loaded into special climate-controlled transport to a section of the Darling further south, near Wentworth, where the river joins the Murray, which is still flowing.
New South Wales Department of Primary Industries fisheries scientists are targeting fish contained within drying pools that are not expected to last through the summer.
However, the government has not said how many fish it will move. One source told the Guardian it was hoped it would be in the hundreds, but this is just a fraction of the population of the river and will not prevent the likelihood of further mass fish deaths.
“It’s a photo-op rather than a real deal,” said a Menindee local, Graeme McCrabb, who has become a spokesman for the local community on the lower Darling.
The NSW Natural Resources Commission has called for an urgent revision of the rules that allow irrigators to extract from the river when flows are very low.
“The fish rescue program will preserve some genetic diversity, but the government also needs to monitor the surrounding ecosystems, as [returning] fish would not survive if mussels and other invertebrates are lost,” Sheldon said.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
US ELECTION: Polls show that the result is likely to be historically tight. However, a recent Iowa poll showed Harris winning the state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020 US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours. The Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win over the last holdouts with less than 36 hours left until polls open on election day today. Trump predicted a “landslide,” while Harris told a raucous rally in must-win Michigan that “we have momentum — it’s
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered