Puffer fish plague in Turkey: poison fish threaten the Mediterranean

Cengiz Balta has been fishing off the Turkish Mediterranean coast in the Gulf of Antalya for 35 years – like his father and grandfather did – now he is plagued by the hare-head puffer fish. Balta is the head of a fishing cooperative in Antalya with around 100 members. For some years now, fishermen have been pulling the unpleasant immigrants out of the sea more and more often.

On a Sunday morning, Balta is sitting with colleagues on one of the boats in the harbor, repairing nets. Five young puffer fish, the size of a palm, lie on the jetty in the manageable harbor. The sun has dried them up and made them stiff. “Not even the seagulls eat them,” says Balta and throws the dead fish into the harbor basin.

“Doesn’t fill your wallet or your stomach”

Around 100 puffer fish end up in the nets of Balta’s cooperative alone every day, and up to 1000 a day in all of Antalya. “It doesn’t fill your wallet or your stomach,” says Balta, summarizing the problem. There are several reasons for this: the puffer fish is poisonous, the tetrodotoxin that the fish carries in the liver, for example, paralyzes the muscles and can sometimes be fatal.

That is why the fish does not end up on any plate in Turkey and is not sold. At the same time, the puffer fish menu reads like the menu in the delicatessen department: squid, crab, shrimp, octopus. He doesn’t even need to hunt his prey himself. The puffer fish like to use the catch in the fishing nets – they often leave them not only plundered, but also broken.

Every year fishermen lose a month’s income due to the plague

The fishermen suffer great losses. “The damage per fisherman is the equivalent of 450 euros per year,” says Ekin Akoglu, marine biologist at Odtü University in Ankara. That is an enormous damage if the average monthly income of a small fishery is only 340 euros.

Although it only has four teeth in its mouth, it can bite properly. If you open the stomach of a puffer fish, it is not uncommon to find bitten off hooks, says Akoglu. The immigrant, who originally came from the warmer Red Sea, found his way into the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869.

With its eating behavior, puffer fish destroy the ecosystem

Because it hardly has any predators in the Mediterranean, it was able to spread quite undisturbed. Also global warming and the increase in temperature in the Mediterranean means that the fish can spread better there. He is not only an annoying sea creature for fishermen, but also destroys the ecosystem in the sea with his overpresence. So far, the fishermen kill the unwanted catch directly and throw it back into the sea.

The puffer fish can grow to be more than a meter long and weigh up to seven kilograms. Specimens that Balta and his colleagues catch are usually around 30 to 40 centimeters long. A fisherman from the cooperative talks about his personal record: about three years ago he caught a nine-kilo rabbit-head puffer fish.

Turkey pays five lira for every fish

Puffer fish can puff themselves up in danger and usually create a thick blister on the lower body, so they not only appear larger on possible enemies – they may also fit poorly into the opponent’s mouth.

With a presidential decree, the government has now declared war on fish: five lira, around 50 cents, are available for each specimen of the hare’s head. Fishermen can hand over their catch to specially established government agencies. Similar programs have existed before, but limited in time and not for all types of troublemakers.

Girls had to have their fingers removed after being bitten

The fish can also be a danger for tourists and beach goers. A nine-year-old had part of her finger removed after a bite two years ago. “The fish is not aggressive in itself, but it is a wild animal that defends itself when it feels attacked,” says the marine biologist Akoglu. The younger fish in particular preferred to be on the sandy bottom – and therefore often on beaches that are also popular for swimming. Akoglu does not believe that the puffer fish is a threat to tourism in Turkey. Incidents like the one in 2019 could increase if the puffer fish continues to spread as much. The closer you get to the Suez Canal, the denser the population becomes. “So it is not only a problem for Turkish fishermen, but for many people bordering the Mediterranean.”

Balta and the fishermen in his cooperatives think the Turkish government’s measure makes sense, and the money is right, he says. He has a number of ideas about what to do with the fish: “You can safely make knives out of your teeth, and you can use the poison to make medicines.” He also knows of projects that make bags out of fish skin. He has already come up with a special catching system for the puffer fish.