Ecology and environmental conservation organizations yesterday urged the government to draw up measures within two weeks on ways to save the nation's Indo-Pacific humpbacked dolphins.
The dolphins are also known as "Matsu fish" (媽祖魚) because they generally appear along the west coast around the March birthday of the sea goddess. Easily recognizable by their light pink color, they like to gather close to the seashores and bayous in the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific Ocean.
Staging a skit in front of the Executive Yuan yesterday, members of the Matsu Fish Protection Alliance urged the government to speed up efforts to save the humpbacked dolphins, of which there are fewer than 200 left near Taiwan, the group said.
Their habitat is gradually being destroyed by several government-approved development projects along the west coast, Ecology Academy General Secretary Chen Bing-heng (陳秉亨) said yesterday.
Chen said conservation experts from countries such as Canada, Japan and the US passed a resolution in an international conservation seminar in Taiwan in September establishing a consultancy group that offers assistance on Indo-Pacific humpbacked dolphins conservation.
Chen said that Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist at the Humane Society, announced in Washington on Tuesday the establishment of the Taiwan Sousa Working Group to support the cause.
Peter Ross, a marine mammal toxicologist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada's Institute of Ocean Sciences, is the chairman of the group's advisory team, Chen said.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
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