Fishing in the Yangtze River has been banned for ten years. In addition to the main stream of the Yangtze River, what other places are prohibited from fishing?

According to the deployment of the State Council, before New Year's Day in 2021, the Yangtze River Basin will implement a comprehensive fishing ban, starting a "ten-year fishing ban" in the Yangtze River. According to the requirements of the "Implementation Plan for Fishing Bans and Establishment Compensation in Key Water Towns in the Yangtze River Basin": before the end of 2019, the Yangtze River Aquatic Life Reserve will complete fishermen's withdrawal from fishing, take the lead in implementing a comprehensive fishing ban, and stop all productive fishing. Before the end of 2020, fishermen must complete the withdrawal of fishing in the waters outside the protected areas of the main stream and important tributaries of the Yangtze River, and a 10-year fishing ban is tentatively implemented. The so-called ban on fishing in the Yangtze River directly involves "one river, two lakes, and seven rivers", including the mainstream of the Yangtze River, important tributaries such as the Minjiang River, Tuojiang River, Chishui River, Jialing River, Wujiang River, Hanjiang River, and Dadu River, as well as river-connected lakes such as Poyang Lake and Dongting Lake. State Council documents clearly stipulate that recreational fishing is allowed, that is, individual fishing with one rod per person is recreational and is not prohibited. Rare and endangered species and juvenile fish cannot be caught. However, in areas along the Yangtze River such as Jiangsu, Hunan, and Chongqing, and along major tributaries such as the Yuanjiang River and the Xiangjiang River, Most are completely closed to fishing.

Why did the fishing ban last so long for ten years? Due to long-term overfishing, there is basically no fish left to catch in the Yangtze River. Today, the resources of the Yangtze River's "four major carps" (herring, grass carp, silver carp, and bighead carp) have shrunk significantly. The catch has dropped by more than 90% compared with the 1950s, and the spawning volume has dropped from a maximum of 120 billion to a minimum. Less than 1 billion. The reproduction and growth of the four major species of fish usually takes four years, and the fishing ban period is set for ten years to allow them to reproduce for two or three generations, so that their numbers can be restored. Moreover, the recovery of aquatic life is relatively slow, especially certain algae plants, which cannot be recovered overnight. Therefore, in order to solve this problem once and for all, a fishing ban period of up to ten years is directly set up.

The Yangtze River has more than 400 species of fish and more than 180 species of endemic fish. The Yangtze River is not only a natural germplasm resource bank for important economic fishes such as green grass, silver carp and bighead carp, but it is also a refuge for many rare aquatic organisms. In the "List of National Key Protected Wild Animals" approved by the State Council in 1988, there are 16 species of rare and protected wild fish. Among them, the first-level protected animals distributed in the Yangtze River system are Chinese sturgeon, white sturgeon and Yangtze sturgeon, and second-level protected animals. Protected animals: mullet fish, flower eel, Sichuan-Shaanxi Zheluo salmon and Songjiang perch, etc. The Yangtze white sturgeon, a unique species in China and a national first-level protected animal, has become extinct, and the number of Chinese sturgeon breeding groups has dropped to less than 20. These fish species suffer from habitat destruction caused by human activities. Their populations are scarce and their survival is seriously threatened.

Due to backward fishing methods and small catches in the past, humans have not had a major impact on nature. But now with industrialized and mechanized fishing, human beings’ demands for resources exceed the rate of resource growth, and now our Yangtze River is basically devoid of fish. In this increasingly serious situation, more and more people are fishing in the lake and are resorting to illegal operations such as electro-poisonous bombing and netting to deplete the lake. Eventually, resources are being harvested less and less, and the ecology is getting worse and worse. It is a vicious circle where fishermen become poorer as they catch more. Therefore, the Yangtze River mainstream and important tributaries have temporarily implemented a ten-year year-round fishing ban system, which prohibits all productive fishing.