A Chinese expert has warned that foreign aquatic species could
seriously endanger China's ecology if they are released into the
wild.
The warning comes after a farmer named Xiao Chunsheng, from central
China's Hubei
Province, caught a strange fish in the Hanjiang River, a
tributary of the Yangtze, as he was swimming in the river on
Saturday morning.
The fish was described as having flowing black stripes down the
length of its body, with the mouth bigger on the lower side of its
head, and with a flat belly and narrow back.
On
examining the fish, Professor Chen Wei, of the Aquatic Life
Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, concluded it was a
kind of catfish from the Amazon River in South America.
Professor Chen ruled out the possibility that the fish had swum
across the ocean, up the Yangtze to the Hanjiang River.
"It is certain that the fish was brought into China as an
ornamental fish, but was released into the Hanjiang River later,"
the expert was quoted as saying by Beijing Youth Daily
yesterday.
"Releasing foreign aquatic species into China's rivers at random
may easily lead to an invasion of foreign species into China's
biosphere," said Chen, who feared that the foreign fish could cause
disastrous damage to the country's ecological balance if it
propagated and formed a new species in Chinese rivers.
China already suffers from the hyacinth, a water-based plant which
used to be found only in South America, and has to spend huge sums
every year to remove the plant from rivers.
The plant was introduced to China 50 years ago as fodder for pigs.
Uncontrolled growth of the plant leads to pollution of the water
and stifles the growth of aquatic life. The hyacinth has been
listed as one of the world's 10 most harmful plants.
(Xinhua News
Agency July 30, 2002)