[Coral-List] Invasive Tilapia

[Neviaty Zamani]

Dear All,
Thank you Abigail, for your concern to our country.  Indonesia is beautiful country and many foreigner really concern. The question, how far the Indonesian people concern to their oun environment?????.  Most of indonesian people always thinking how to increase income.  If we see the gov. policy, there are not many funding available to support basic ecological study, which is important to sustain the local resources.

Tilapia are invasive species in Indonesia.  They have wide distribution.  We can find Tilapia from the high land into estuarine area.  At the moment, agriculturist are trying to develop the best and good quality of Tilapia culture (much bigger and strongger, and easy to bread).  They also try to develop study to get different color of tilapia, especially the red one.  For people who does not know fish, they thougt  that it is red sanpper.  This Tilapia will grow until 1 kg with the length 25-40 cm.  It is really need a lot of effort to change the gov policy on aquaculture.  How ever we have to try and fight for it to sustain our beutiful marine tropical ecosystem.

Let's strat do it from our mailing list.  We can share the idea and experiences.

Best regards

 
----------------------------------------------------
Neviaty P Zamani, Dr
Department of Marine Science and Technology
Bogor Agricultural University, INDONESIA


address:
Marine Centre, 4th floor
Department of Marine Science and Technology
Bogor Agricultural University
Jalan Lingkar Akademi, Kampus IPB Dramaga
Bogor 16680, West Java, INDONESIA


phone:  + 62 251 629131, 622938
fax:      + 62 251 626380, 623644
mobile: + 62 818 355 099


e-mail:  np_zamani at yahoo.com


----- Original Message -----
From: Abigail Moore <abigail2105 at yahoo.com>
To: "coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov" <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Cc: 
Sent: Tuesday, 29 November 2011 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Invasive Tilapia

Dear fellow listers

I also am most worried about Tilapia in brackish and salt water environments, thoguh this is the first time I have had any inkling others out there are also concerned. Research by a colleague has shown that the strains used in aquaculture here can withstand very high salinity, even above seawater, though growth is not optimal. 


These Tilapia are now being grown in tambak, brackish-water ponds originally intended for shrimp culture. Even without actual marine culture being introduced there is I feel a high risk of escape to the marine environment through the water inlet and outlet channels as well as through flooding events.

Knowing what Tilapia have done to endemic fish species in the lakes around here (e.g. Lindu and Poso) as well as to the fish fauna of some smaller less famous lakes, essentially outcompeting to the point of extinction or near extinction of native/endemic species, it is indeed very worrying.

With the current policy of Indonesia becoing the largest aquaculture producing country in the world by 2015, and ambitioius targets by local governments, it is going to be very hard to stop such activities as are already underway or prevent their spread, unless some compelling economic argument can be put forward. One related to fisheries or some other current economic activity, not tourism which is not a realistic alternative in most of our coastal areas, thoguh almost all have coral reefs, at the very least fringing reefs, arguably the most vulnerable to Tilapia take-over.

Best regards

Abigail

Abigail Moore
Sekolah Tinggi Perikanan dan Kelautan (STPL)
Kampus Madani

Jl Soekarno-Hatta

Palu 94118
Sulawesi Tengah
Indonesia



________________________________

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 05:09:10 -0700
From: Paul Jarvis <carpenpan1 at yahoo.com>
Subject: [Coral-List] Invasive Species
To: "coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa..gov" <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Message-ID: <3272808E-24A3-4776-BA6E-69DADC0A8787 at yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;    charset=us-ascii

Hi all,
I am a lurker here on the list.
I enjoy working with corals and am concerned with reef ecology. I am also a fisheries biologist. One of the lists I belong to is the yahoo tilapia mailing list.

This past week a thread was started there on the topic of saline full strength seawater tilapia production.

The concept of tilapia reproduction in seawater scares the heck out of me. As you can see this could be an ecological disaster. Tilapia are very fecund and would spread like a disease if ever encouraged to reproduce in full salinity seawater.

Just wanted to give the heads up on this before it gets out of hand.

According to listers on the tilapia list progress and success has already been achieved.

Perhaps you can do something before Pandoras box is opened.

Sincerely,
Paul Jarvis,
Fisheries Biologist, Aquaculturist
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