This giant member of the carp family has a distribution which has always been limited to South India\u2019s River Cauvery basin and it\u2019s now believed to be so endangered it may be extinct in the wild within a generation.<\/p>\n
Adrian Pinder of Bournemouth University, said: \u201cThe blue-finned mahseer, is not native to the River Cauvery, yet our studies over the last two years have shown that they are now one of the most abundant fish in the river. Without a doubt, their success has been at the expense of the humpbacked mahseer that historically occurred throughout the entire river catchment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Pinder has been studying the ecology of 17 species of mahseer that populate rivers throughout South-east Asia with Dr Rajeev Raghavan of St Albert\u2019s College in India since 2010. Four of these species are already listed as \u2018Endangered\u2019 on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.<\/p>\n
Their recent paper co-authored with Dr Robert Britton, published by the research journal, Endangered Species Research, reveals that as well as the competition with the blue-finned mahseer, many other pressures are placed upon the fish of India\u2019s rivers, including pollution and poaching.<\/p>\n
In 2012, the scientists set up the Mahseer Trust, an NGO working to protect mahseer and its habitats.<\/p>\n
They are currently focusing on sourcing specimens of the fish to obtain DNA, get the species properly identified and have it classified as \u2018Critically endangered\u2019 on the IUCN Red List.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Iconic Indian freshwater fish, the humpback mahseer, is on the brink of extinction according to scientists from Bournemouth University in the UK and St Albert\u2019s College in Kochi, India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6494,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-6493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6495,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493\/revisions\/6495"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6493"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=6493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}