Letters | Rare stingray in Victoria Harbour a welcome sign of nature’s restoration
Readers discuss how Hong Kong’s marine conservation efforts are paying off, plans for a residential development in a Tai Po site, and geopolitical contests in Central Asia
It is hard for us now to imagine Victoria Harbor teeming with marine life. This is due to what is known as the “shifting baseline syndrome”, wherein the lack of collective living memory makes us convinced that the current reality is the only one that has ever existed.
The mandatory reduction of fishing pressure offers a rare opportunity to observe the “rewilding” of our local seas. Even in the early days of the trawl ban, the abundance and variety of wildlife sampled from the sea floor began to change – at that time observed by Professor Kenny Leung’s team at the Swire Institute of Marine Science.
My own observations were equally hopeful. A year after the ban, I began to see a great quantity of commercially important swimming crabs on many dives – animals that would normally be captured by trawling. Some time later we witnessed hundreds of juvenile butterfly rays sprinting about Centre Island in Tolo Harbour. After that I encountered a large aggregation of adult butterfly rays, nearly 2 metres in width and pregnant, resting in the sand just off the beach at Cheung Chau.