Huchen - Fish of the Year 2015

The Huchen (whoo whoo) was together from German fishing association (DAFV) and the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) to Fish of the year 2015 appointed. Less for aesthetic reasons - although the spotted predatory fish by no means looks unsightly - but much more for reasons of Species protection of fish in all of Europe the huchen is representative of the inevitable restoration of our rivers, which must now take place in order to ban many other fish such as the huchen from the red list of endangered species.

The "King of the Alpine Rivers", as he is also called, is one of the largest native salmon fish (salmonids). It can reach up to 150 cm in length and weigh over 25 kilos. You can recognize it by its black swabs on the back that lie over the copper to grayish-green skin. You can find it in Germany mainly in the Danube and its tributaries in Bavariawhich is why he got the name Danube salmon wearing.

But that was different.

On the other hand, around 100 years ago, this fish could be brought ashore further south in the Ulm area. In the meantime, the area has unfortunately shrunk a lot, so that the salmonids can only be found in the area around Munich and even there currently has to be Struggle for survival began.

He prefers to stay in fast flowing, cool and oxygen-rich waters on. Stony and gravelly subsoil provide the ideal environment for spawning. As far as the Danube, Isar, Inn and Co actually offer the perfect habitat for the fish, but at the end of the 19th century they already appeared first negative influences . Weirs and hydropower plants have been gradually built over the last hundred years, which is why more and more parts of these rivers have dammed. As a result its flow rate slowed down, Soil softened and the huchen had to look for new places to spawn. That is also not entirely uninvolved in the well-being of the river dwellers Isar 2 nuclear reactor. He needs a lot of water from the regional rivers for cooling and is accordingly heated up again, which is why the average water temperature rises drastically in places. 21 ° C is not so healthy for the salmon - in the various record summers of recent years, however, up to 28 ° C has been reached, which also inevitably led to the flight of the huchen and other species, if you consider that the optimal temperature for the Spawning is 6 - 9 ° C.

Fortunately, there are some fish farms that do that Counteract the extinction of animals. Thousands of fish are bred again and again and released in the Iller, Isar, Lech and other Danube tributaries (and of course the Danube itself) to the to get the current inventory.

For Dr. Christel Happach-Kazan, President of the DAFV, this is sometimes only a "temporary emergency measure". The fish population needs to grow again reproduce naturally and in addition are Renaturation measures and the receipt of the last natural stretches of water necessary.

The huchen is available as a fish this year symbolic of all threatened fish species in Europe. In Bavaria, in particular, there are still some of them on the red list like that Barbel, the eel and the nerflingwhose populations are also considered to be endangered. If nothing changes soon, these and other fish will be threatened with extinction in the foreseeable future.