World’s deepest lake in peril!

MOSCOW: Lake Baikal is undergoing its gravest crisis in recent history, experts say, as the government bans the catching of a signature fish that has lived in the world’s deepest lake for centuries but is now under threat.

Holding one-fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh water, Baikal in Russia’s Siberia is a natural wonder of "exceptional value to evolutionary science" meriting its listing as a World Heritage Site by Unesco.

Baikal’s high biodiversity includes over 3,600 plant and animal species, most of which are endemic to the lake. Over the past several years, however, the lake, a major international tourist attraction, has been crippled by a series of detrimental phenomena, some of which remain a mystery to scientists.

They include the disappearance of the omul fish, rapid growth of putrid algae and the death of endemic species of sponges across its vast 3.2 million-hectare area.

Starting in October, the government introduced a ban on all commercial fishing of omul, a species of the salmon family only found in Baikal, fearing "irreversible consequences for its population", the Russian fisheries agency told AFP. "The total biomass of omul in Baikal has more than halved since 15 years ago" from 25 million tonnes to just 10 million, the agency said.