Channel Newsasia makes a meal of a vulnerable species of fish

First published on greenkampong.com

Our very own Channel Newsasia ignores the fact that the Giant Garoupa or Queensland Grouper was put on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in 2006, and instead celebrates the story of a restaurateur who bought one this week and is selling it to customers at $20 per 200g.

via Channel NewsAsia:

The owner of a restaurant in Singapore has reeled in a man-sized Queensland garoupa off the coast of Sabah. And he expects to feed 600 customers with it.

The garoupa weighs 150 kilogrammes and is two metres long. It is so big that it had to be brought in on Monday morning using a forklift.

via IUCN:

Being such a large predator, it is rare even in areas unexploited by fishing (Randall and Heemstra 1991) and it has nearly been extirpated in areas where it has been heavily fished (Lieske and Myers 1994) for the live reef food-fish trade; this is a trade in live fish for food which is centred in SE Asia and expecially China and Chinese communities.