Fishing Competition

I saw a banner advertising a fishing competition with interest recently. The Competition offers big prize money and should be able to attract large crowd of angklers. This reminded me on what a group of environmentalists have advocated few years ago.

Under a lake rehabilitation program, multiple strategies were carried out in which one of them was organising the fishing competition for alien fishes. The rationale of removing the alien fishes from our river ecological system is most of the river bank and side of lake have experienced soil erosion due to the existence of alien fishes especially the "ikan bandaraya". "Ikan bandaraya" is fond of digging deep in side the soil for their habitat living and this becomes the cause for river bank unstability. Apart from that, the high growth rate of flower hon and tilapia fish have actually displaced many of the local species. This has caused breakage of ecological supply chain and eventually the natural environment. That's why removing these fishes will help to restore the original state of environment. With that believe in mind, few competitions were organised with the objective of rehabilitating the lake or river.

Nowasday, for the purpose of attracting participation whenever a fishing competition is held, the organiser will create a gimmick by releasing big and new fishes onto the pond few day before the competition. These newcomers might not be able to survive at the first place, secondly it will bring disruption to the existing ecological system. Thereby, it is not advisable to have this practice. However, for the sake of publicity and perhaps lack of knowledge about the environmental preservation, this practice has been continue again and again.

While fishing competition is a healthy activity and for good character building that should be encouraged, sacrifying the ecological system or do not contribute to rehabilitate the nature environment, to me is something we should all avoid to do.