Dam the lungfish

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has recently announced plans to damn (/dam) the last remaining pristine river system, the Mary River, home to the rare Australian lungfish (Neoceratodus fosterii).

Lungfish go back 400 million years. Given that animals only evolved at the beginning of the Cambrian 530Myr ago, they've been around for over 75% of the history of crawling lifeforms. They've seen the dinosaurs go extinct, lived through meteorite impacts and volcanic events that would have wiped out civilisations, they've even battled through the Permian-Triassic mass extinction - the worst ever - where 96% of all life went extinct. Not the lungfish.

What's more, the Australian lungfish is the closest thing we've got to the missing link that first crawled out of water onto land, and eventually evolved to become amphibians, reptiles, mammals and human beings. It is our genetic ancestor. Damming the Mary river is like bulldozing a nursing home.

But now all that's left are a few scattered species around the globe, of which the Australian lungfish is unique. It has existed in quiet, slow flowing streams virtually unchanged for 100Myr. Now in one foul swoop Beattie wants to damn its last remaining habitat and send the lungfish to a watery oblivion.

The lungfish are hard to breed in captivity - its only been done once. And that required two ponds the size of Olympic size swimming pools. The Queensland Government has promised a fish elevator to carry the lungfish over the dam. Not really going to help, because the fish need quiet, slow flowing streams to spawn, and always return to the same area to spawn. The dam will destroy their spawning ground, according to expert Jean Joss at Macquarie University.

The lungfish was only native to two river systems in Queensland, the Burnett River and the Mary River. The Burnett river has already been dammed to satisfy SE Queensland's water problems. The damming of the Mary River system will destroy the last habitats of the lungfish, and there is a good chance it will send em extinct in the wild (and given the difficultly in breeding them in captivity, probably just extinct).

A complete coverage is in this weeks Nature (including the editorial).

The Queensland government needs an environmental impact assessment at a federal level before it can proceed with its plans. Lets see if the Australian EPA does what its there for.

In the meantime, if the dam does get blocked, it doesn't solve the water problem. What is the solution? One is a desalination plant based in Brisbane. An other is large-scale recycling of water.
Recent news coverage of drinking bore water, recycling in Toowoomba and dam problems in Qld.