The death of fish in the Oder shocks Germans and Poles alike. The search for causes at the border river is not made any easier by the participation of two countries. New test results will be presented on Monday.
On Monday, the first results of a bilateral group of experts on the Oder fish kill will be presented at the German-Polish Environmental Council. The Environment Council will be informed about the current situation, said the Brandenburg Environment Ministry. Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke is meeting with her Polish counterpart Anna Moskwa in Bad Saarow in Brandenburg.
The states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania also take part in the council. Brandenburg wants to work with Lemke and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for further constructive cooperation in the processing, announced the Potsdam Ministry of the Environment. It should be discussed with Poland how the ecological condition of the Oder can be restored. Solutions are also to be discussed as to how such fish kills and ecological damage can be better prevented in the future. Brandenburg’s Environment Minister Axel Vogel wants to confirm his rejection of the Polish decision to expand the Oder. The Ministry and environmental organizations had lodged an objection.
Masses of dead fish had been discovered in the German-Polish border river. The exact cause of the fish kill is not yet clear. Experts assume that a high level of salt in the river is a major reason for the environmental catastrophe, combined with low water, high temperatures and a toxic species of algae.
The reintroduction project for the Baltic sturgeon also suffered a major setback as a result of the disaster. “But it’s not a total failure, because sturgeons are a very long-lived fish species that can live up to 100 years and can also survive poor environmental conditions,” said Jörn Gessner from the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Berlin.
Since the start of the project, 3.5 million mini sturgeons have been raised and then released into the Oder. The animals, which are then about 20 centimeters in size, migrate to the mouth of the river, the Oderhaff, where they continue to grow for two years until they swim into the Baltic Sea. When they reach sexual maturity after 15 to 20 years, they should return to the Oder to spawn. Gessner assumes that the sturgeons will actually return as soon as the river has regenerated and the animals can find food and spawning grounds there.
In a sturgeon breeding station in Friedrichsthal (Uckermark) in Brandenburg in the Lower Oder Valley National Park, a third of the 20,000 offspring died because contaminated Oder water flowed through the facility. The remaining specimens, three to five centimeters in size, were released during an emergency rescue in the national park’s polder waters, which currently have no connection to the border river.
According to the national park administration, dead sturgeons measuring around 30 to 90 centimeters in size were also found when the fish died in the Oder, probably reared young animals from previous years. By Saturday a week ago, around 200 tons of fish carcasses had been collected in Poland and Germany.