The world's oldest, largest and arguably ugliest freshwater fish, already on the brink of extinction in North America, is now facing a new and highly unexpected threat to its survival in Canada -- the international Kyoto accord on the environment.
The agreement, to which Canada is a signatory, recently sparked a massive planning effort in this country to build more than 100 new hydroelectric dams in central and western parts of the country to generate cleaner energy and replace aging fossil-fuel-burning plants to meet Canada's reduced greenhouse-gas emissions target under Kyoto.
But these structures will cut off the armor-plated lake sturgeon -- which once swam in nearly every river and lake in North America, survived predation by dinosaurs and was a staple for local Aborigines for centuries -- from its breeding grounds as well as destroy its habitat, environmentalists said.
"It's a bizarre turn of events that this species is now connected to Kyoto," University of Manitoba zoologist Terry Dick said.
He has been trying in earnest to reintroduce the lake sturgeon into local rivers.
"It's a big problem because hydroelectric dams are primarily built on good spawning sites or nursery areas where the fish feed. It's going to be an issue in [the provinces of] Manitoba and Ontario where they're now looking at rivers where before they weren't going to have hydroelectric dams," he said.
These so-called living fossils can live to more than 100 years, weigh as much as 100kg and grow to more than 2m long. With elongated, cone-shaped snouts and rows of bony plates on their backside, the freaky fish are prized for their meat, eggs and oil.
But their numbers in western Canada have steadily declined over the past 150 years since the arrival of European settlers due to overfishing.
A century ago, Canadian fishermen netted millions of kilograms of lake sturgeon each year, stacking them like logs on lakeshores. Sightings of them nowadays are rare enough to make newspaper headlines, and scientists estimate that fewer than 1,000 are left in western Canadian rivers and lakes -- equal to the remaining number of plains bison that were once a symbol of Canada's vast prairies.
Plans to build three massive hydroelectric dams in the province of Manitoba and 100 or more smaller dams in Ontario over the next decade, all connected to a new east-west power grid to feed Canada's industrial base in Ontario, will quicken the fish's demise, observers fear.
The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, tackling the issue a year ahead of originally planned after sensing some urgency, has declared the species endangered in western Canada and at risk in eastern Canada.
This follows similar actions in the US.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS