The Chinese bahaba (''Bahaba taipingensis''), also known as the giant yellow croaker,Moore, M. (21 August 2012)

The Telegraph. Retrieved 18 May 2019. is a critically endangered species of marine and

brackish Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. It may result from mixing seawater (salt water) and fresh water together, as in estu ...

water

fish Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of ...

in the family

Sciaenidae Sciaenidae are a family of fish in the order Acanthuriformes. They are commonly called drums or croakers in reference to the repetitive throbbing or drumming sounds they make. The family consists of about 286 to 298 species in about 66 to 70 gene ...

. It is a large fish, reaching lengths up to and weights of . It is found on the coast of China, from the

Yangtze River The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ; ) is the longest list of rivers of Asia, river in Asia, the list of rivers by length, third-longest in the world, and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. It rises at Jari Hill in th ...

estuary southwards to the

Pearl River The Pearl River, also known by its Chinese name Zhujiang or Zhu Jiang in Mandarin pinyin or Chu Kiang and formerly often known as the , is an extensive river system in southern China. The name "Pearl River" is also often used as a catch-a ...

estuary, including the waters of

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...

and

Macau Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a p ...

. Its natural

habitat In ecology, the term habitat summarises the array of resources, physical and biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species habitat can be seen as the physical ...

s are shallow seas, subtidal aquatic beds, rocky shores, and estuarine waters.

Distribution

The Chinese bahaba is known only from the parts of China from the Yangtze River southwards to Hong Kong. It enters estuaries to spawn and in the past it was seasonally numerous in this habitat. This includes the estuaries of the Yangtze River, the Min River and the Pearl River and around the coast of

Zhoushan Island Zhoushan Island is the principal and namesake island in the Zhoushan Islands, formerly romanized as the ChusanIslands, an archipelago administered by Zhoushan Prefecture in Zhejiang Province in the People's Republic of China. It is the provinc ...

Behaviour

The Chinese bahaba is a bentopelagic fish that feeds mostly on crustaceans such as shrimps and crabs.

Conservation status

Annual catches of 50 tonnes were taken in the 1930s, but this had dwindled to 10 tonnes per year by the 1950s and 1960s when few large fish were caught. The Chinese bahaba is threatened by overfishing and it is listed as critically endangered by the

International Union for Conservation of Nature The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN; officially International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of nat ...

. Degradation of its estuarine spawning habitats may also have contributed to its decline. Although listed as a Grade II State Protected Species in China, which is supposed to restrict its capture, the sale of recently caught individuals to very high prices still occurs, and is even announced to the media. A part of the Pearl River estuary has been protected since 2005 by the Chinese Government in an attempt saving the species. Unlike the Chinese mainland, there is no legal protection of this species in Hong Kong, despite it being rare there, and that the

World Wildlife Fund The World Wide Fund for Nature Inc. (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1961 that works in the field of wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. It was formerly named the Wo ...

and fisheries scientists at the

University of Hong Kong The University of Hong Kong (HKU) (Chinese: 香港大學) is a public research university in Hong Kong. Founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, it is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong. HKU was also the f ...

have recommended its protection to the local government. Chinese bahaba caught in Hong Kong are also sometimes transferred to the Chinese mainland where resold. The fishing is prompted by the value placed on the swim bladders of this fish for use in

traditional Chinese medicine Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an alternative medical practice drawn from traditional medicine in China. It has been described as "fraught with pseudoscience", with the majority of its treatments having no logical mechanism of acti ...

. In some markets, notably the Chinese markets, a good specimen swim bladder fetches more than its weight in gold. As the population of the Chinese bahaba declined, some trade shifted towards the closely related

totoaba The totoaba or totuava (''Totoaba macdonaldi'') is a species of marine fish, a very large member of the drum family Sciaenidae that is endemic to the Gulf of California in Mexico. It is the only species in the genus ''Totoaba''. Formerly abundan ...

(''Totoaba macdonaldi'') of Mexico, a species that now also is seriously threatened.Juarez, Lorenzo M.; Pablo A. Konietzko; and Michael H. Schwarz (15 December 2016)
Totoaba Aquaculture and Conservation: Hope for an Endangered Fish from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.
WAS. Retrieved 18 May 2019.Hance, J. (11 January 2016)
China's craze for 'aquatic cocaine' is pushing two species into oblivion.
The Guardian. Retrieved 18 May 2019.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q703327 Bahaba Endemic fauna of China Fish of China Fauna of Hong Kong Critically endangered fish Critically endangered fauna of Asia Fish described in 1932 Taxa named by Albert William Herre Taxonomy articles created by Polbot

Distribution

Behaviour

Conservation status

See also

References