Half a kilometre stretch of sea was filled with floating dead fish few kilometers off Il-Hofriet last Friday. This was sighted by Dr. Adriana Vella, assisted by BICREF members during scientific marine surveys around the Maltese Islands.

While the sight of these thousands of dead fish was revolting, their stench was even worse. BICREF is worried by the lack of inspections and effective implementations of measures to protect our marine environment and is sad to note that its fears, of having offshore developments work without the necessary assessments, monitoring and action, are confirmed to be reality.

These dead fish may be agents of disease that may spread to different marine organisms with wide reaching impacts on our marine ecosystems and resources. For this reason it is hoped that such a finding will be investigated by the relevant authorities. Similar wide reaching effects of coastal developments, such as tuna pens, have been reported by BICREF in the past, which illustrated the spread of organic and smelly substance out of the tuna pens for kilometers according to the direction of the sea current.

BICREF has also taken note of several dead and decaying bluefin tuna strandings along our coasts, which peaked last September and October, luckily for swimmers not in the main swimming season. With all this one may wonder if simply moving all aquaculture to one corner of our islands will solve these problems and whether environmental impact assessments and MEPA have indeed ever taken care of the wider side affects these developments would have on our marine life and our quality of life..

BICREF's REPLY TO
Dead fish in the sea by Sylvana DeBono, public relations officer, Malta
Environment and Planning Authority.

With reference to letter dated 4th August 2004 on the article "Thousands Of
Dead Fish Seen Off St Thomas Bay/Delimara" published on the Times (28th
July) we would like to point out that the stated article included
contributions and sources from various parties, thus BICREF can only respond
to its press release (a copy of which has been sent to MEPA's chairman).

We are sorry that half a kilometer spread of floating dead fish did not fit
in one photo; nonetheless BICREF did supply to the press photos with a
multitude of fish. Though MEPA states that the fish species could not be
positively identified from the photo on The Times, just the same MEPA goes
out to throw a guess on the type of fish by stating that it seems "sea bass
(spnott)", and to exclude them from being tuna pens' bait (tuna feed).

BICREF must disagree with MEPA's fish guess and is surprised at this as
BICREF had last Thursday discussed the matter with an environment protection
inspector of MEPA and indicated what the fish were observed to be. We gave
the facts there and then. Thus MEPA's insistence to exclude the tuna
penning is strange to us. May we also point out that though we mentioned
coastal developments being the cause of various problems in our seas,
including tuna penning, we did not conclude in our press release that the
dead fish was directly related to tuna penning, but rather that we expected
an investigation.

It is extremely improbable that the floating fish was the result of a
coastal explosion. First, all the fish were alike. Second, it would have
been a remarkable hit for the hypothetical illegal fishermen who preferred
to leave a bonanza behind.

As for contacting MEPA immediately, it has been mentioned already too often
in the media that indeed MEPA is not the most reachable of local authorities
since even the published numbers were not found to respond.

Since MEPA experts decided to guess what the dead fish were and to exclude
tuna pens, without seeing anything, it is apparent that indeed MEPA is
running to conclusions. BICREF's communications to MEPA have been ignored
in the past and thus the media have shown greater reliability, none the
less, BICREF stated that it still hoped that some authority would have
investigated the matter. Apparently this now seems to exclude MEPA for
which the case seems resolved and closed without considering the facts.