IT has been revealed that releases of cold water from Victoria’s Hume Dam are hampering the spawning opportunites for native fish such as Murray cod that populate the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers.
This issue has been highlighted as part of a key recommendation in the Native Fish Strategy for the Murray Darling Basin 2003-2013 (MDBC) and adopted by the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA).
According to a recent article written by Jennifer Marohasy and published in The Land,
the strategy for the Murray Darling Basin aims to return native fish to 60 per cent of their pre-European levels, but cold water releases from Hume Dam are preventing native fish from spawning.
The article suggests the problem could be solved by retrofitting dams with multi-level outlets, but nothing has been done in this regard.
According to Marohasy, the blame lies with trout fishers who don’t want the cold water pollution “fixed” as it will alter the current cold water conditions that ideally suit their favoured introduced salmonids.
“So all the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent luring Murray cod up the river to just below Hume dam are to be wasted. Indeed they may simply hasten the decline of this majestic species because the river remains freezing cold – in an eternal winter – because the fly fish lobby trumps the native fish strategy,” she wrote.
The Native Fish Strategy is reviewed in a recent conference paper by Jennifer Marohasy and John Abbot entitled ‘Deconstructing the native fish strategy for Australia’s Murray Daring Catchment’ published by the Wessex Institute and available for free download at
http://library.witpress.com/pages/PaperInfo.asp?PaperID=24656
Read more details here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/2013/06/fishing-lobby-trumps-murray-cod-recovery-the-native-fish-strategy-for-the-murray-darling-ten-years-on-part-3/
