Heatwave kills Swiss fish

GENEVA: Roughly a tonne of fish have been killed in recent days by high temperatures in Swiss waters caused by the European heatwave, public broadcaster RTS reported on Tuesday.

The most severely affected area is the stretch of the Rhine river that runs from Lake Constance to the Rhine Falls, where barrels of dead grayling have pulled from the river since the weekend.

"We have been watching dead fish for several days floating down the Rhine. We had to recover about 1,000 kg from the river," Andreas Vogeli, an official with the hunting and fisheries department in northern Schaffhausen canton, told RTS.

The cold-loving grayling, a member of the salmon family, can struggle when water temperatures exceed 20 degrees Celsius, but certain areas of the Rhine have recorded temperatures above 27 degrees Celsius in recent days.

Samuel Grundler of the Swiss fisheries association said that the situation was "very precarious in many small and medium size stretches of water."