January 27, 2022
20:16
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Hundreds of thousands of farmed fish have died from cold in a lagoon in northwestern Greece after the country was hit by a snowstorm this week, BTA reported.
Dead fish, sea bream and white bream, began surfacing on the Richogo Lagoon in Lake Drepano early Tuesday after the water temperature dropped to 0 degrees Celsius.
The damage is huge, with an estimated 50 tonnes of dead fish here, said Ioannis Uzunoglu, who works at the state-owned fish farm after collecting some of the fish in his boat.
In all the last years I’ve been recording and measuring temperatures in the area, I’ve never expected to have such low sub-zero temperatures, he said.
Countries in the region were hit by unusually cold weather, including Athens, which was covered in snow. The enclosure of the lagoon has prevented fish from swimming into the deeper waters of the lake or sea to survive, said scientist Konstantinos Perdikaris of the Fisheries Department.
They died of thermal shock, said Perdikaris, who visited the lagoon on Tuesday.
Sea bream, unlike other fish, is sensitive to low temperatures and cannot survive below 4 degrees Celsius, Perdicaris said.
Usually the temperatures in the lagoon at this time are 7-8 degrees.
We release them into the lake every year, but this year, unfortunately, we did not have time to release them in time, because the cold came quickly, Uzunoglu said.
The fish farm has 600,000 fish of different species. Other species were not harmed, according to Reuters.
