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Apr. 4, 2008 - Today on CBC Radio¹s MARITIME NOON were two interesting fish-related stories of conservation interest: The first item concerned ATLANTIC BLUEFIN TUNA. ICAT, an international group for conservation of Atl. bluefin tunas, which should be regulating the harvests of this species, has representatives of 42 countries??, and 12 of these have just met to consider the OVERFISHING plight of this species and the possibility that its status might become so dire that CITES might have to list the species with trade restrictions. (CITES is the Committee on International Trade of Endangered Species.) Bluefin tunas are so valuable, because of the demand for sushi and sashimi etc., that it is very difficult politically to get any meaningful controls over fishing regulations. Costas¹ guest today was someone named Jones. (Stories about the Atl. bluefin tuna have occurred regularly on Maritime Noon and no doubt will continue to do so.) The second item was for Randy Lauff, who for a long time has been very interested in NON-NATIVE SPECIES, i.e. ALIEN SPECIES, of both animals and plants, and their effects on native species and ecosystems. Recently some early sport fishers have been catching 2-3-pound RAINBOW TROUT in the Sackville River. Costas¹ guest on this story said the characteristics of these fish suggested they were escapees from aquaculture, i.e. fish farming (and apparently there have been some known recent escapes of numbers of them). How many on this list didn¹t know that RAINBOW TROUT is a non-native species in Nova Scotia? Our province has a long history of raising them in hatcheries and releasing them in lakes for sport-fishing; such fished populations supposedly should not spread to other water-bodies or watersheds? Hopefully the Sackville River fish can be extirpated by strong fishing efforts. Also they are commercially farmed as ³STEELHEAD SALMON² in ocean cages -- ³steelheads² are sea-run rainbow trout, and these are just as alien or non-native in our waters as are the freshwater rainbows.
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