Originally Posted by
Ben D
Finga, You do the scientists and vets who have worked on this case a great discredit when you suggest these sorts of things, especially as its clear you have absolutely no understanding of the extent of the investigation that has been done. The people involved here are aquatic animal health specialists. We are aware of the "normal" deformities caused by random mutations ect. Its our job to know this and we see these things on a regular basis in other hatcheries. However in this case the type and extent of the deformities is clearly abnormal , and very strongly correlated to chemical sprays in an adjacent farm. When your larvae are convulsing in the tank, but recover and behave normally after dosing with atropine (an antidote for some of the chemicals involved), you have an extremely strong link between chemicals sprayed on the farm next door in the previous 24 hours and what is happening in the hatchery tanks, even though the doses of chemicals the fish are being exposed to are minute. Then there is the issue of the two headed bass spawned from wild fish taken from the Noosa River. Why were wild caught Noosa River bass (not one fish, but several breeding pairs) held in the hatchery only for a short period of time (ie. they are not aquacultured fish) spawning such high numbers of deformed larvae, with the most common deformity being two heads ? The fact that 100% of these bass larvae died within 48 hours surely suggests there is a problem which needs to be thoroughly investigated. Its virtually impossible for fishermen to catch 100% of the adult bass in a river, but if you poison the water its possible to kill 100% of the larvae (which are much more sensitive to chemicals at particular stages of their development than are adult fish). While no-one sees the dead larvae (they are only a few mm long and for all intents and purposes invisible), the end result is the same - it just takes a few years to kill off the fish population, quietly, but effectively. This may be the tip of an unpalatable iceberg, and the State government has tried to firstly ignore and then play down the problem. But the issue is too compelling to ignore, their own government pathology report implicates pesticide contamination as the only possible causative factor that explains all of the syndromes observed, and the media have been given the report and are awake to the usual games and are keeping the government honest. The green groups , however, have been noticeably silent on the matter to date - I guess it doesn't really fit their agendas....
Good thing is, if we follow though on this one and get some real changes on what pesticides are used, and how they are used, and how they are screened for safety (i.e. include fish larvae in testing) we may indeed reap many valuable benefits for the health of our aquatic ecosystems and fisheries into the future.... This is really the first instance I know where we can stop saying "pollution is an issue" in a non specific manner, and clearly link reductions in fish recruitment (by reduced viability of eggs and larvae) to commonly used pesticides which are being used legally and as per the label all around the country. Yes the main problem is in a hatchery, but if the hatchery wasn't there, we would never have known about the issue with the local bass, and in 10 years might well have never exactly determined why the fishing in the river began to go downhill when the macca farms came. So there is a corpse with a big hole in it, a smoking gun, and the government is suggesting its not a shooting because they can't find the bullet....
So start writing those letters everyone. This is one issue where we can really benefit our fisheries if we get it right.
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Two heads are better than one and besides you'd be an unfortunate bloke with only one head
