By Satyaki Paul
Recently, the Blue-Finned Mahseer was shifted to the least-concern species according to the reports of International Union of Conservation of Species (IUCN).Earlier it was placed in the red list of endangered species.
Image: Blue fin vs. Hump-back Mahseer (source: Google Image)
The Tata group is currently involved in conservation of the blue-finned and golden mahseer for 50 years in Lonavala. However, the golden mahseer is still in danger of going extinct.Around 5-lacs mahseer are bred at the Walvan Hatchery in Lonavala, where an artificial lake has been created. However, the blue-finned Mahseer has now replaced the endemic Humpback Mahseer, which have been artificially bred and introduced in the river in the name of conservation.
In similar vein, the research titled “The legendary hump-backed mahseer Tor sp. of India’s River Cauvery: an endemic fish swimming towards extinction?” by Robert Britton et al (2015) opined that the introduction of the non-native, blue-finned Mahseer has had a catastrophic effect on the numbers of endemic Mahseer in the Cauvery.
The study area of the research was on the river Cauvery i.e., Galibore Fishing Camp. The scientists associated angling data collected from 1998 to 2012.This corelation pointed out that since 1993, the orange-finned Mahseer variety was the only phenotype captured by anglers in the Cauvery. The advent of the blue-finned phenotype is likely to relate to fish movements and hatchery-reared fish that were initiated in the 1970s.
In 2019, Shoal (an international organisation working to conserve freshwater species) initiated “Project Mahseer”. This leads to a conflicting end result as conservation of invasive species are being done which ultimately leads to the extinction of endemic species.Furthermore, the scientists observe that India’s freshwater fish are now under pressure from multiple factors such as pollution, sand and gravel extraction and low water flow levels in rivers.This can limit the capacity of fish to travel to procreatingregions. Nonetheless, what is the current goof-up regarding Mahseer conservation is yet to unfold.
The author works as a Ph.D. Research Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, University of Calcutta, and the co-author of the book Anthropology For All (2021).