It wasn’t the provincial budget and the b.s. antics by all involved. It wasn’t the fact that there will now be an Integrity Commissioner governing the Code of Conduct at London City Hall. No, what affected me most this week was the story of the franken-fish.
I’m always delighted to discover there’s a species of creature I didn’t know about but this one sounds awfully freaky: the snakehead. This story comes from my colleagues at Blackburn News in Chatham:
“A Chatham man is facing a $2,000 fine for owning snakehead fish. Yung-Chieh Liu pleaded guilty to the charge of possession of two of the live invasive fish. Snakehead can survive on land for up to four days and travel up to a 1/4 mile or 400 m. between water bodies. The fish were handed over to the crown during the sentencing in Blenheim Apr. 17.”
They have no natural enemies and the female can lay as many as 15,000 eggs at a time, five times a year. In Asia and Africa they’re a food fish. They’re illegal here and in many US states but people keep “introducing” them to our environment. I never imagined there was a fish that could come up out of the water and move about on land. At least, not since Darwin told us it happened a long, long time ago.
EWWWWWW! that is all.
A lovely little destroyer of ecosystems. There was one caught in the Welland Canal a couple years ago by a local woman so we already have them in the Great Lakes. In the next couple of years we should be seeing them everywhere as their population increases exponentially. Local chefs better start working on tasty Franken-fish-on-a-bun and Snakehead Almondine creations. The Erie Beach Hotel will be offering only Franken Platters with their famous Celery Bread because these top-of-the-aqua-food-chain monsters will mean the end of the perch and pickerel industries.