Hundreds of farmed fish have died from chilly in a lagoon in north-western Greece after a heavy snowstorm crippled the nation this week.
The useless fish, all seabream and white seabream, within the Richo Lagoon of the Drepano Lake in Igoumenitsa, appeared early on Tuesday (January 25) after temperatures within the lagoon had dropped as little as zero levels celsius.
“They died from thermal shock,” stated native Ichthyologist Konstantinos Perdikaris from the Division of Fisheries, who visited the lagoon on Tuesday.
The Seabream species are delicate to low temperatures and can’t survive under 4 levels celsius, stated Perdikaris. Common temperatures within the lagoon at the moment of 12 months are about seven to eight levels celsius, he stated.
The fish have been at a shallow depth the place the chilly was faster to penetrate the water.
“At shallow depths the response of the air is extra intense,” stated Perdikaris.
Drone video confirmed hundreds of useless fish floating on the floor, within the water and on the shores of the lagoon.
The fish belonged to a neighborhood state-owned fish farm, and on account of their containment in an enclosure within the lagoon they might not swim out to the deeper depths of the lake or sea to outlive, stated Perdikaris.
“Yearly we free them into the lake, however this 12 months sadly we didn’t have the possibility to free them in time, as a result of the frost (got here rapidly),” stated fish farm cultivator Ioannis Ouzounoglou, who works on the farm, as he gathered the piles of useless fish from the lagoon onto a rowboat.
“In all of the final years that I’ve been recording and measuring temperatures within the space, I by no means anticipated that we’d have such low temperatures,” he stated.
The fish farm contained greater than 600,000 fish of assorted species, and Ouzounoglou estimates that some 50 tonnes of fish have been destroyed. Different species weren’t harmed.
“The destruction is large,” he stated.
A bunch of stray cats anxiously sat on the dock of the lagoon ready for the rowboat filled with useless fish to dock.