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.