Category Archives: Environmental


Canada takes European seal ban to WTO

As reported earlier , the European Union has decided to ban the import of seal skin and other seal products hailing from commercial seal hunting.

This has upset Canadian seal hunters since Italy and Denmark, both members of the European Union, are two major importers of seal products. Italy imports most of their seal skins from Russia, but Denmark has always been an important trade partner for North American seal hunters, partly due to Denmark’s traditional connection to Greenland.

According to a statement from Canadian Trade Minister Stockwell Day, the federal government is now getting ready to move in with an appeal against the ban, which they see as a clear breach of WTO regulation.

We’ll go to the WTO because it’s clear in WTO regulations that if one country wants to ban the products of another, it has to have clear scientific, medically acceptable reasons for doing so, and this EU ban is not based on hard science,” Day said.

seal

The Canadin government believes that Canada deserves an exemption from the import ban since it follows internationally accepted guidelines regarding seal hunting, e.g. by prohibiting the clubbing of baby seals while they still have their white coats.

Day claims that the European ban is based on “people’s feelings” rather than hard facts, and says that the trade action will proceed unless the European Union Parliament exempts Canada and other countries that he said practise humane and sustainable seal hunting. According to Day, seal hunt proponents erroneously portray seal hunting as it was 40 years ago.

The suggested seal import ban must still be approved by individual European governments before becoming law but can, if passed, come into effect as early as next year. If the is approved, it will cause an annual 2 million USD loss for the Canadian industry.

Canadian Fisheries Minister Gail Shea agrees supports the government’s planned trade action.

When you live in small coastal communities, sometimes there’s not many opportunities to make some additional money,” she said. We have a number of families who make up to 35% of their annual income from the seal hunt. So yes, I do think it’s very important.”

As reported earlier, the proposed European seal import ban will contain some exemptions and seal products resulting from hunts traditionally conducted by Inuit and other indigenous communities can still be imported to and marketed in European Union countries even if the ban is approved. Products that result from hunting conducted for the purpose of sustainable management of marine resources on a non-profit basis will also be allowed, and individual travellers will be permitted to bring seal products to the European Union as long as the import is of an occasional nature and consists exclusively of goods for the personal use of the traveller.

Indonesia creates Southeast Asia’s largest marine park

Indonesia will create Southeast Asia’s largest marine park in the Savu Sea, Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries Freddy Numberi said on Wednesday at the World Ocean Conference in Manado, Sulawesi.

The Savu Marine National Park will cover 3.5 million hectares in an incredibly diverse area where you can find no less than 500 coral species, over 300 recognized species of fish and a lot of charismatic wildlife like sea turtles, sharks, dolphins and whales. Out of 27 known species of whale, no less than 14 migrate through the Savu Sea to get from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. The Savu Sea is also an important spawning ground for many marine species, including the world’s dwindling tuna population.

Suave national marine park

Indonesia is famous for its prosperous marine environment, but this marine flora and fauna are today facing serious treats, including pollution, over fishing and the use of unsustainable fishing methods. Lax enforcement of Indonesian law has made it possible for fishermen to continue using illegal fishing methods such as dynamite and cyanide fishing.

Within the Savu Marine National Park, efforts will be made to eradicate illegal fishing practises while keeping certain areas open for local fishermen to continue traditional subsistence fishing. Tourism activities will also be allowed in certain designated areas within the park. Environmental groups, including WWF and The Nature Conservancy, will help set up the reserve together with the Indonesian government.

Enforcement is one of the key questions we need to work out, said Rili Djohani”, marine expert at The Nature Conservancy. “It could be a combination of community-based and government patrols.”

The Savu Marine National Park is located within the so called Coral Triangle, a coral reef network bounded by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.

New study focused on human impact along the US West Coast

Every single spot of the ocean along the West Coast is affected by 10 to 15 different human activities annually”, says Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

In a two-year long study, Halpern and his colleagues have documented the way humans are affecting the ocean off the West Coast of the United States. The research team has overlaid data on the location and intensity of 25 human derived sources of ecological stress, including commercial and recreational fishing, land-based sources of pollution, and climate change. The information has been used to construct a composite map of the status of West Coast marine ecosystems.

US West Coast

We found two remarkable and unexpected results in this research,” says Halpern. “Ocean management needs to move beyond single-sector management and towards comprehensive

ecosystem-based management if it is to be effective at protecting and sustaining ocean health. Also, the global** results for this region were highly correlated with the regional results, suggesting that the global results can provide valuable guidance for regional efforts around the world.”

The study results show that hotspots of cumulative impact are located in coastal areas close to urban centres and heavily polluted watersheds.

This important analysis of the geography and magnitude of land-based stressors should help focus attention on the hot-spots where coordinated management of land and ocean activities is needed,” said Phillip Taylor, section head in NSF’s* Division of Ocean Sciences.

You can find more information in the article from the research team published in the journal Conservation Letters on May 11. The project was conducted at NCEAS, which is primarily funded by NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology.

* National Science Foundation (NSF)

** The lead scientists on the U.S. study have already carried out a similar analysis on a global scale; the results were published last year in Science.

Green plume from Venezuela have now reached the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico

A strange algae plume has turned the normally crystal clear Caribbean Sea around the Virgin Islands green down to a depth of roughly 80 feet (25 metres) and sharply decreased visibility in these popular dive waters. How and if the plume will have any long-term effect on the region’s marine life remains unknown.

Tyler Smith, assistant professor at the Center for Marine and Environmental Studies at the University of the Virgin Islands, said that when he went diving Tuesday the visibility inside the plume was no more than 10 feet (3 metres). Below 80 feet, the water was just as clear as normally.

The reason behind the extraordinary plume can be found in South America, in the Orinoco River which flows through Venezuela before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. When the Orinoco outflow is larger than normal, the vast amounts of nutrient-rich freshwater from Venezuela cause a major algae bloom in the nearby ocean. Mixed fresh- and saltwater is lighter than seawater and will therefore rise to the top of the water column.

Orinoco virgin islands

It’s very stable, so it just sits there,” Smith explains.

Carried by currents, the algae plume has now spread from the South American east-coast to the Caribbean Sea and can currently be seen not only off the British and U.S. Virgin Islands but in Puerto Rican waters as well. The first patch was noticed by Smith and his colleagues in the waters off St. Croix on April 9.

When the amount of photosynthesising alga increases in a region, it attracts all sorts of organisms that feed on algae and make it possible for these populations to boom as well. The algae plume around the Virgin Islands supports an entire food chain of marine life, including plankton, jellyfish, crustaceans and fish. It is not dangerous to swim or scuba dive in, but some people might dislike the high density of jellyfish.

This is an event that occurs every year, but we haven’t seen it come this far north,” says Trika Gerard, marine ecologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In a stroke of good luck, a NOAA research vessel was scheduled to research reef fish in these waters from April 7 to April 20 – right at the peak of the unexpected plume.

To find out more about how the plume effects marine life, the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council is urging anyone who goes out fishing in the green plume to report their location, target species and success rate of each trip. According to local fishermen the fishing is always awfully bad when the water is green, but this has not been scientifically researched yet and all data is of interest.

You can reach the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council by calling (787) 766-5927. Their website is http://www.caribbeanfmc.com.

Underwater turbulence from jellyfish may be major player in carbon sequestration

The ‘underwater turbulence’ the jellies create is being debated as a major player in ocean energy budgets,” says marine scientist John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology.

Jellyfish are often seen to be aimless aquatic drifters, propelled by nothing but haphazard currents and waves, but the truth is that these gooey creatures continuously contract and relax their bells to move in desired directions.

jellyfish

The jellyfish Mastigias papua carries algae-like zooxanthellae within its tissues from which it derives energy and since the zooxanthellae depend on photosynthesis, the jellyfish has to stay in sunny locations. Research carried out in the so called Jellyfish Lake, located in the island nation of Palau 550 miles east of the Philippines, shows that this jellyfish doesn’t rely on currents to bring it to sunny spots – it willingly budges through the lake as the sun moves across the sky.

In Jellyfish Lake, enormous congregations of Mastigias papua can be found in the western half of the lake each morning, eagerly awaiting dawn. As the sun rises in the east, all jellyfish turn towards it and starts swimming towards east. The smarmy creatures will swim for several hours until they draw near the eastern end of the lake. They will however never reach the eastern shore, since the shadows cast by trees growing along the shoreline cause them to stop swimming. They shun the shadows and will therefore come to a halt in the now sundrenched eastern part of the lake. As the solar cycle reverses later in the afternoon, millions of jellyfish will leave the eastern part of the lake and commence their journey back to the western shore.

Together with his research partner, marine scientists Michael Dawson of the University of California at Merced, John Dabiri have investigated how this daily migration of millions of jellyfish affects the ecosystem of the lake.

What the jellies are doing, says Dabiri, is “biomixing”. As they swim, their body motion efficiently churns the waters and nutrients of the lake.

Dabiri and Dawson are exploring whether biomixing could be responsible for an important part of how ocean, sea and lake waters form so called eddies. Eddies are circular currents responsible for bringing nitrogen, carbon and other elements from one part of a water body to another. The two researchers have already shown how Jellyfish like Mastigias papua and the moon jelly Aurelia aurita use body motion to generate water flow that transports small copepods within jellyfish feeding range; now they want to see if jellyfish movements make any impact on a larger scale.

Biomixing may be a form of ‘ecosystem engineering’ by jellyfish, and a major contributor to carbon sequestration, especially in semi-enclosed coastal waters,” says Dawson.

Plankton blooms do not move atmospheric carbon down to the deep sea

According to the simplest version of the so called Iron Hypothesis, plankton blooms move atmospheric carbon down to the deep sea and increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere can therefore be counteracted by promoting plankton blooms. The Iron Hypothesis derives its names from the suggestion that global warming can be thwarted by fertilizing plankton with iron in regions that are iron-poor but rich in other nutrients like nitrogen, silicon, and phosphorus, such as the Southern Ocean.

New research from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is now dealing a powerful blow to this hypothesis by showing that most of the carbon used for plankton blooms never reaches to deep sea.

Using data collected around the clock for over a year by deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats, Oceanographers Jim Bishop* and Todd Wood** have revealed that a lot of the carbon tied up by plankton blooms never sink very far.

Just adding iron to the ocean hasn’t been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon,” says Bishop. “What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appear not to sink very fast or very far.”

The reasons behind this behaviour are complex, but the seasonal feeding behaviour of planktonic animal life is believed to play major part.


Photoplankton

The Carbon Explorer floats used in the study were launched in January 2002, as a part of the Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX)***, and experiment meant to test the Iron Hypothesis in the waters between New Zealand and Antarctica during the Antarctic summer.

SOFeX fertilized and measured two regions of ocean, one in an HNLC (high-nutrient, low-chlorophyl) region at latitude 55 degrees south and another at 66 degrees south. Carbon Explorers were launched at both these sites while a third Carbon Explorer was launched well outside the iron-fertilized region at 55 degrees south as a control.

Bishop and Wood were originally assigned to the project to monitor the iron-fertilization experiment for 60 days, but the Carbon Explorers continued to transmit data throughout the Antarctic fall and winter and on into the following spring.

We would never have made these surprising observations if the autonomous Carbon Explorer floats hadn’t been recording data 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at depths down to 800 meters or more, for over a year after the experiment’s original iron signature had disappeared,” Bishop explains. “Assumptions about the biological pump – the way ocean life circulates carbon – are mostly based on averaging measurements that have been made from ships, at intervals widely separated in time. Cost, not to mention the environment, would have made continuous ship-based observations impossible in this case. Luckily one Carbon Explorer float costs only about as much as a single day of ship time.”

The scientific hypothesis that iron can be used to stimulate phytoplankton growth in regions low in iron but rich in other nutrients is still intact and experiments show that algal blooms do in fact occur if you add iron to such waters. The study by Bishop and Wood only shows that the carbon bound by the plankton do not end up far down in the depths of the sea.


Jim Bishop’s team. (From left) Christopher Guay,
Phoebe Lam, Jim Bishop, Todd Wood, and David Kaszuba.

During the early stages of the South Sea experiment, the Iron Hypothesis seemed to hold up to scrutiny as the Berkeley researchers could detect not only a vigorous plankton bloom in the fertilized region at 55°N, but also how carbon particles sank beneath the bloom carrying 10-20 percent of the fixed carbon away from the surface layer and down to a dept of at least 100 meters. These results were published in the 2004April issue of Science.

But since the Carbon Explorers continued to submit information even when the 3-month study was officially over, Bishop and Wood could continue their monitoring of South Sea carbon levels throughout fall and winter and well into the following spring; a continued monitoring that would prove invaluable.

The two Carbon Explorers released at 55 degrees south continued to report for over 14 months and almost reached South America before they turned silent. After this, the explorer launched at 66 degrees south continued to transmit for another four months, despite having spent much of the Arctic winter recording at a dept of 800 meters where the pressure is immense. This explorer also had several encounters with the underside of chunky sea ice as it tried to surface to report during the Arctic winter.

All this new data surprisingly showed that there seemed to be much less particulate matter reaching the depth where the biomass was highest, i.e. in plankton blooms. Reports from the 66°S explorer showed how particulate carbon levels decreased sharply as the perpetually dark Arctic winter commenced and ice began to cover previously open waters. As the sun returned in spring and melted the ice the levels made a modest increase, but no sinking (sedimentation) of large amounts of carbon to the deep ocean was observed.

Another even more surprising report came from the control float, dubbed 55 C, which reported higher sedimentation of carbon 800 meters under a region with no plankton bloom than what the other 55°S (dubbed 55A) reported from the fertilized, blooming region.

Researchers are currently pondering several ideas as to explain these unforeseen results but have not reached any conclusion. A higher biomass seems to be linked to a lower export of carbon, but one knows why. One of the most promising hypotheses takes into account how phytoplankton needs sufficient amounts of light to survive and grow. Latitude 55°S is located far enough from the Arctic for light to reach the ocean year round, even though the amount is severely reduced during the winter months. But the notorious winter storms occurring in these waters can cause mixing between near-surface water and underlying water layers all the way down to a dept of 400-500 meters. Phytoplankton are dragged down to depths where it is too dark for them to grow and where hungry zooplankton waits for them.

Mixing is the dumbwaiter that brings food down,” says Bishop. The question is whether the dumbwaiter is empty or full.”

If mixing is consistently below the critical light level, phytoplankton can not grow, i.e. the dumbwaiter stays empty and the zooplankton gets no food. As the winter storms stop with the advent of spring, the phytoplankton can quickly rebound, aided by increased levels of sunlight. But since a lot of zooplankton starved to death during the winter, the zooplankton population is not large enough to keep steps with the phytoplankton bloom and intercept carbon loaded material as it sinks between 100 and 800 meters.

In the part of the South Sea where Carbon Explorer 55C spent the winter collecting data, storms where not continuous and the mixing was therefore halted now and then. More zooplankton survived, zooplankton which fed on the phytoplankton in spring, keeping their numbers down and increasing carbon sedimentation.

Bishop says these observations point to an important lesson: “Iron is not the only factor that

determines phytoplankton growth in HNLC regions. Light, mixing, and hungry zooplankton are fundamentally as important as iron.”

You can find more information about Bishop and Wood’s study in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles. Preprints of the issue are already available to subscribers at http://www.agu.org/journals/gb/papersinpress.shtml.

* Jim Bishop is a member of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division and a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California at Berkeley.

** Todd Wood is a staff researcher with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Laurence Berkley National Laboratory.

*** The Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX) is a collaboration led by scientists from Moss Landing Marine Laboratory and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Merchant ships top blame for littered sea

According to a new report jointly produced by UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and UN Environment Programme (Unep), merchant ships are to blame for 88 percent of the total marine littering in the world. According to the report, merchant ships deposit 5.6 million tonnes of litter in the ocean each year.

About 8 million pieces of marine litter enters our oceans each day and most of it is solid waste thrown overboard or accidently lost from ships. Right now, an average of 13,000 pieces of plastic litter is floating around per square kilometre of ocean waters, the report says.

The FAO-Unep report has been released right before next weeks’ World Oceans Conference in Manado, Indonesia where marine littering will be high on the agenda.

A majority of the litter from ships is fishing gear, which is either lost or intentionally abandoned in the water. Fishing gear now accounts for one tenth of all marine litter.

sea turtle in disgarded net

The rest consists of various debris, such as shipping containers, pallets, plastic covers, drums, wires and ropes. Accumulated oils are also dumped by ships; oils which can cause serious injury to marine life.

Most fishing gear is not deliberately discarded but is lost in storms or strong currents or from’ gear conflicts’”, the report states. “For example, fishing with nets in areas where bottom-traps that can entangle them are already deployed.”

Unfortunately, lost and abandoned fishing gear will not stop fishing – they will continue to trap animals until they are broken down; a process which can take many years since modern fishing gear are made from highly durable synthetic materials. This is referred to as ghost fishing and is a major problem for aquatic species that need to surface regularly to breathe; a dolphin, turtle or seal caught in a net will suffocate and die. Lost fishing gears are also a problem for ships that become entangled in the equipment and are known to damage boats and cause accidents at sea.

While the report points a finger at merchant vessels, it also states that land-based sources are the main cause of marine littering in coastal regions.

UN recommends financial incentives and new technology

The report recommends using financial incentives to encourage fishers to bring old and damaged gear to port instead of dumping it. Fishers should also be given incentives to bring ghost nets recovered while fishing back to shore and to log and report items lost at sea. For this to work disposal facilities must be set up in ports and a report and recovery system must be established. The report also suggests providing ships with oversized, high-strength disposal bags to place discarded fishing gear in.

A ‘no-blame’ approach should be followed with respect to liability for losses, their impacts, and any recovery efforts,” the report says.

New technologies – such as seabed imaging, geographic Positioning Systems (GPS), and transponderscan be used locate where lost or dumped fishing gear is present and recover it. Fishing ships could use GPS to mark locations where objects have been lost and weather monitoring technology could be used to predict there the stuff will go. It is also possible to attach transponders to fishing gear, shipping containers and other types or property known to frequently get lost at sea.

Weather monitoring technology can also reduce the risk of property getting lost at sea by altering captains in advance, e.g. to prevent them from deploying nets when unusually severe weather is on its way.

The study also recommends speeding up the development and commercial adoption of durable but bio-degradable fishing gear, including gear containing magnetic solutions.

International Convention

Ichiro Nomura, FAO assistant director general for fisheries and aquaculture, has called for industry and governments to take action to radically reduce the amount of lost and abandoned fishing gear in the sea. If nothing is done, fishing gear will continue to accumulate in the world’s oceans and their impact on marine ecosystems will become more and more severe. Nomura stressed that the problem must be addressed on multiple fronts and include both littering prevention and restoration measures.

FAO is currently involved in an ongoing review of Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) as regards fishing gear and shore side reception facilities by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).

Cigarette filters dangerous for fish

Filtered cigarette butts should have new requirements for disposal, says Public Health Professor Tom Novotny after a San Diego State University (SDSU) study revealed filter-tipped cigarette butts to be toxic to marine and fresh-water fish.

According to Novotny and other members of the Cigarette Butt Advisory Group, used cigarette filters ought to be classified as hazardous waste since toxins present in them harm wildlife.

cigarette but kills fish

It is toxic at rather low concentrations,” Novotny explains. “Even one butt in a liter of water can kill the fish in a period of 96 hours.”

Novotny says one way of reducing the amount of cigarette filters in our environment is stronger enforcement of anti-litter laws and non-smoking areas. Fines, waste fees or special taxes are other options, if the money is used to pay for cigarette butt recycling. A third alternative is to force manufacturers to pick up the bill for clean-up costs incurred by their products.

A thrown away cigarette butt is a combination of the original plastic filter and the compounds caught by the filter while the cigarette was being smoked. The plastic makes the filter non-biodegradable and the trapped compounds are toxic until they eventually biodegrades into the environment.

According to Novotny, cigarette butts are the number one littered substance in the world and have been the number one single item picked up on beach cleanup days in San Diego for several years.

When they unconsciously throw their butts onto the ground, it’s not just litter, it’s a toxic hazardous waste product,” Novotny says. “And that’s what we’re trying to say. So that may be regulated at the local or state level. And we hope people will be more conscious about what they do with these cigarette butts.”

The study was carried out by SDSU Public Health Professor Rick Gersberg.

Picture by: Chris Sanderson, in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

Intersex fish more common than anticipated

intersexA recent study on intersex abnormalities in fish living in the Potomac River watershed carried out by researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey showed that at least 82 percent of male smallmouth bass and in 23 percent of the largemouth bass had immature female germ cells (oocytes) in their reproductive organs. This number is even larger than anticipated.

This type of intersex indicates that the fish has been exposed to estrogens or chemicals that mimic the activity of natural hormones. The condition is believed to be caused by hormone-like chemicals, so called endocrine disruptors, found in medicines and a variety of consumer products. Earlier, researchers suspected that the contaminants were entering the Potomac from the wastewater treatment plants that discharge into it, but further sampling showed that the problem existed in areas located upstream from sewage plants as well. Officials are now investigating if multiple chemicals, and not just those from sewage plants, may be responsible. A larger study that includes the entire Potomac River and other East Coast rivers will be launched to find out how widespread the problem actually is.

At the moment we don’t know the ecological implications of this condition and it could potentially affect the reproductive capability of important sport fish species in the watershed,” said Leopoldo Miranda, Supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay Field Office.

The Potomac River is the fourth largest river along the Atlantic coast of the USA (in terms of area), with a length of approximately 665 km (383 statute miles) and a drainage area of roughly 38,000 km² (14,700 square miles). It flows into the Chesapeake Bay along the mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S. The river is shared by West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, and District of Columbia, and all of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital city, lies within the Potomac watershed.

More information is available in the Intersex fact sheet released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay Field Office.

Madagascar!

Madagascar, a large island situated in the Indian Ocean off the south-eastern coast of the African continent, is home to an astonishing array of flora and fauna. Madagascar, then part of the supercontinent Gondwana, split from Africa about 160 million years ago and became an island through the split from the Indian subcontinent 80-100 million years ago.

Madagascar is now the 4th largest island in the world and its long isolation from neighbouring continents has resulted in an astonishingly high degree of endemic species; species that can be found nowhere else on the planet. Madagascar is home to about 5% of the world’s plant and animal species, of which more than 80% are endemic to island. You can for instance encounter Appert’s Tetraka bird (Xanthomixis apperti), the carnivorious Fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox) and over 30 different species of lemur on Madagascar. Of the 10,000 plants native to Madagascar, 90% are endemic.

The diverse flora and fauna of Madagascar is not limited to land and air; you can find an amazing array of creatures in the water as well – including a rich profusion of endemic fish species. Unfortunately, the environment on Madagascar is changing rapidly and the fish – just like most of the other creatures – risk becoming extinct in the near future.

The fishes of Madagascar currently have to deal with four major threats:

  • Deforestation
  • Habitat Loss
  • Overfishing
  • Invasive species

In a response to this, and to educe people around the world about the fish of Madagascar, aquarist Aleksei Saunders have created the website Madagascar’s Endangered Fishes on which he shares his knowledge of Madagascan fish species and the perils they’re facing, but also highlights all the things we can do to improve the situation.

The site focuses on freshwater fish conservation and captive breeding, since collection of wild fish to bring endangered species into captivity for managed reproductive efforts plays a large part of the conservation effort in Madagascar.

In addition to the website, Alex is also gives power-point presentations on husbandry and conservation breeding of Madagascar’s endemic fish fauna, since more and more aquarists around the world are taking a large interest in doing their part to help endangered fish species.

Alex has worked with fish since 1990 and it was through his work as an aquarist at Denver Zoo he became enthralled with the ichthyofauna of Madagascar. During the early 1990s Denver Zoo started a conservation program with the endemic freshwater fishes of Madagascar and in 1998 Alex got the chance to pay his first, but certainly not last, visit to the island. Today, his trips primarily focus on educating the Malagasy on their wonderful natural heritage and ways of conserving it, assessing the condition of native freshwater habitats and the fish population therein, and collecting wild fish for managed captive breeding. Alex now manages on of the most diverse collections of Madagascan endemic fishes in North America, including 5 species of rainbowfish, 4 species of cichlid, and 3 killifish species.

With this site I hope to educate, motivate, and stimulate people into action to help save Madagascar’s endangered fishes. Please look around the site. There are sections for fish hobbyists, adventure travellers, conservation biologists, and just those curious about the world in which we live.

Cheers,

Aleksei Saunders