The value of a living fish…

I would be interested to know what value positive press has nowadays. A well-paid public relations agency in Lisbon has been sending out a press release to all the newspapers and magazines operating in Portugal, highlighting the environmentally-friendly behaviour of a company that is actively involved in tourism in the Algarve. The press release is not just about the company’s environmentally-friendly behaviour; it even focuses on an extraordinary project in which three ‘corporations’ have joined forces to breed a species of fish that is no longer to be found in the region’s streams, i.e., it is considered to be extinct. First of all, the fish are bred in an aquarium and then reintroduced into the stream in order to market the whole thing to the public in a positive way. Win-win-win. So, it seems that successful public relations can work. Can you plan positive press? Can you buy positive press?

I would also be interested in knowing the value of an animal, in this case a fish, and whether, after a year has passed, at least half of the 20 freshwater fish that have been released into the stream are still alive, or whether anglers, the fish’s worst enemies, are still being allowed to catch them for dinner. I’d also like to know whether the stream, which often runs dry in midsummer, will be a good biotope for freshwater fish in 2025 and whether the freshwater fish can hold their own against other enemies, such as the water hammer? How will this be tested? How will it be found out? How will it be researched? Is there any monitoring of this project, which Zoomarine has christened with the name of ‘Falanges’? Perhaps Quercus, the environmental organisation, could tell us more about this, or even Águas do Algarve SA, the water supplier?

Which brings us to the topic in hand. Back in 2002, when the plan was made to build a dam on the River Odelouca, it was still a river that guaranteed reserves of drinking water for the Algarve in times of shortage (that is to say, in times of climate crisis), with more than ten million tourists a year. It could not have been foreseen that the river would mutate into a stream with very little water of extremely poor quality, caused by discharges of pig manure and other wastewater. Fish have a hard time trying to survive in such a stream, but, if they haven’t died, they are still alive today … in an artificial aquarium at the Zoomarine Fun-Park in Guia, near Albufeira. The stream itself can hardly be described as a flowing body of water in summer, and it is tidal as far as Falacho, 18 kilometres upstream, so that brackish water is to be found in the stream’s bed. Day after day, with its tides, the sea pushes this water up the Arade and Odelouca rivers and then lets it flow back down again. The water is often low in oxygen, and it rarely exists as pure freshwater. They must have known this at Zoomarine and also at Quercus when they set out to catch a nearly extinct freshwater fish called Escalos-do-Arade (lat.:Squalius aradensis) and then place it back into the stream bed. Sometimes there are islands in the middle of the stream bed; that’s how little water the former River Odelouca now carries, because the water that had been collected in front of the dam wall is gladly used by the water supplier ‘Águas do Algarve SA’. And it remains to be seen whether thousands of cubic metres of water will be released at the request of a few desperately gasping fish, which could soon be left high and dry. A cubic metre of water is a valuable commodity, costing 0.46 euros when it is sold to the water supply companies of the 16 towns in the Algarve. This is a good business because it is then sold on for a much higher price, and even if half of the water is lost due to the dilapidated pipe system (see the DECO report on this subject), you can still make good money with water, especially in the populous coastal towns. Water is important for a fish; it has no legs that it can stretch out to walk with when there is no water in the stream …

ECO123 contacted Sofia Bach, who is responsible for public relations at Zoomarine, and she invited us to the Dolphin Park to talk about the ‘Falanges’ project and answer the many burning questions that we have. We will report on this matter again next week and develop the topic further. Stay tuned. We’re not finished yet…