Experts Launch Renewed Efforts To Conserve Rare Fish Species

April 12, 2009

Release from: Taiwan News

Taipei - The government has enlisted the help of four academics to launch another effort to conserve the Formosan landlocked salmon -- a critically endangered indigenous species -- later this month, officials of the Ministry of the Interior disclosed Sunday.

The officials at the Construction and Planning Agency said that an initial survey by the four experts showed that the Luoyewei River in the Sheipa National Park in central Taiwan is an ideal environment where artificially bred young fry of the species can be released.

The Formosan landlocked salmon -- a holdover from the last Ice Age -- has been designated as a national treasure. The salmon became landlocked during the last glacial epoch in frigid mountain streams, and thus its discovery in Taiwan -- a subtropical island -- is considered a biological miracle.

A survey conducted last October showed that after five successive typhoons stuck central Taiwan in 2008, the number of the fish in Taiwan's mountain streams dropped from some 5,300 to 3,600.

The four academics in charge of the new conservation efforts are ecologist Lin Sin-Chu, ichthyologist Tseng Ching-hsien, aquaculture expert Huang Yi-syun, and river expert Ye Chao-sian.

They have found that the 11.4-kilometer river along the 2,700-meter-high Luoyewei Mountain has many deep ponds with agreeable temperatures and suitable oxygen levels that provide ideal new habitats for the rare fish.

The officials said that the new conservation efforts became necessary because the 1,280 artificially bred young fish released in a number of rivers in the national park between 2006 and 2008 had a survival rate of less than 1 percent, mainly because of the typhoons last year.

Most of the existing fish are found in the Cijiawan river, a protected sanctuary for the Formosan landlocked salmon in the Sheipa National Park. Formosan landlocked salmon grow to about 30 centimeters in length and inhabit cold, slow-flowing streams with gently sloping beds at elevations above 1,500 meters, such as the Cijiawan river upstream from the Dajia River.