A poisonous sea creature troubles Turkish fishermen. The puffer fish keeps reproducing. Now a kind of bounty was placed on the animals.
Istanbul – It only has four teeth in its mouth, but it causes a lot of people a lot of trouble: The rabbit-head pufferfish has been spreading quite undisturbed in the Mediterranean for years and is multiplying despite countermeasures. The Turkish government now wants to attack the animal across the board.
One of those fishermen stricken by the puffer fish is Cengiz Balta. He has been fishing off the Turkish Mediterranean coast in the Gulf of Antalya for 35 years – just like his father and grandfather did. He is the head of a fishing cooperative in Antalya with around 100 members. For several years now, he and his colleagues have been pulling the unpleasant immigrants from the sea more and more often.
On a Sunday morning, Balta is sitting with colleagues on one of the boats in the harbor, repairing nets. Five young puffer fish, the size of a palm, lie on the jetty in the manageable harbor. The sun has dried them up and made them stiff. “Not even the seagulls eat them,” says Balta and throws the dead fish into the harbor basin.
Around 100 puffer fish end up in the nets of the fishermen from Balta’s cooperative alone; in Antalya in general there are up to 1000 every day. “It neither fills your wallet nor your stomach,” says Balta, summarizing the problem. There are several reasons for this: the puffer fish is poisonous, the tetrodotoxin that the fish carries in the liver, for example, paralyzes the muscles and can sometimes be fatal.
That is why the fish does not end up on any plate in Turkey and is not sold commercially. At the same time, the puffer fish menu reads like the menu in the delicatessen department: squid, crab, shrimp, octopus. He doesn’t even have to hunt it down himself. The puffer fish like to use the catch in the fishing nets – they often leave them not only plundered, but also broken.
For fishermen this means huge losses. “The damage per fisherman is the equivalent of 450 euros per year,” says Ekin Akoglu, marine biologist at Odtü University in Ankara. This is an enormous damage with an average monthly income of around 340 euros in small-scale fishing.
Although it only has four teeth in its mouth, it can bite properly. If you open the stomach of a puffer fish, it is not uncommon to find bitten off hooks, says Akoglu. The immigrant, who originally came from the warmer Red Sea, found his way into the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869.
Because it hardly has any predators in the Mediterranean, it was able to spread quite undisturbed. Global warming and the rise in temperature in the Mediterranean mean that the fish can spread better there. He is not only an annoying sea creature for fishermen, but also destroys the ecosystem in the sea with his overpresence. So far, the fishermen kill the unwanted catch directly and throw it back into the sea.
The puffer fish can grow to be more than a meter long and weigh up to seven kilograms. Specimens that Balta and his colleagues catch are usually around 30 to 40 centimeters long. A fisherman from the cooperative talks about his personal record: about three years ago he caught a nine-kilo rabbit-head puffer fish.
The common thing about puffer fish is that they can puff themselves up in danger and usually create a thick blister on the lower body, so they not only appear larger on possible enemies – they may also fit into the opponent’s mouths less well.
With a presidential decree, the government has now declared war on the fish: five lira, around 50 cents, are given for each specimen of the hare’s head that fishermen hand in at places set up for this purpose – and half a lira for the other types of puffer fish, which are less common are. Similar programs have existed before, but limited in time and not for all types of troublemakers.
The fish can also pose a threat to people in other ways, such as a nine-year-old in the southern province of Mersin in 2019, whose finger was removed after a bite. “The fish is not aggressive in itself, but it is a wild animal that defends itself when it feels attacked,” says the Akoglu. The younger fish in particular preferred to be on the sandy bottom – and therefore often on beaches that are also popular for swimming. Akoglu does not believe that the puffer fish is a threat to tourism in Turkey. Incidents like the one in 2019 could increase if the puffer fish continues to spread as much. The closer you get to the Suez Canal, the denser the population becomes. “So it is not only a problem for Turkish fishermen, but also for many Mediterranean countries.”
Balta and the fishermen in his cooperatives think the Turkish government’s measure makes sense, and the money is right, he says. He has a number of ideas about what to do with the fish: “You can safely make knives out of your teeth and use the poison to produce medicines.” He also knows about projects that make bags out of fish skin. He has also devised a catching system specifically for the puffer fish. dpa
