Death haunts China’s ‘angry river’: Scientists find 40 per cent of fish species gone from free-flowing Nujiang near Tibet
As government moves to kick-start stalled plan to build 13 dams over China’s final free-flowing river, scientists fret about impact on local biodiversity as overfishing, mining and construction works blamed for declining aquatic life.
Scientists scavenging for information on the genetic make-up of fish in China’s last free-flowing river, which runs from the western Chinese province of Tibet down to the Andaman Sea between Myanmar and Thailand, have found that close to half of the species on the Chinese side have vanished.
They made the shocking discovery when conducting a study on the DNA of aquatic life in the Nu river, which is still flowing freely as a plan to build 13 dams on it has been temporarily suspended.
The Chinese team claim to have detected just 46 remaining species, including three invasive species that are believed to have been illegally released into the water way by local farmers.
This would represent a drop of 40 per cent from historical records, according to their paper published
this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
The scientists found that recent human activity was mostly to blame for the lack of diversity. The study was led by Professor He Shunping at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province.