Yellow croaker 'savior' revives depleted stock

Once almost extinct, the fish is now a favorite Chinese dish. Gu Qianjiang, Zhang Yizhi and Xu Xueyi report for Xinhua.

At 6 am every day, 57-year-old You Weide steers a boat to a floating house on the sea and scatters fish feed across the surface of the water that is divided by lines of plastic planks. A shoal of fish rises and takes elegant bites.

Set in the middle of tranquil Sandu Bay in Ningde, in the eastern province of Fujian, is one of the millions of ocean farms in China that produce nearly two-thirds of the world's cultivated seafood, according to fishery authorities.

If you open Google Earth and zoom in, you will see floating farms virtually everywhere along China's coastline. That is how Chinese families can afford a range of seafood such as fish, shrimps, clams and crabs for their daily meals.

You raises large yellow croakers, one of the four major ocean fish in China in terms of the number produced and eaten.

In some coastal regions, it is traditional for children to visit their maternal grandparents during Dragon Boat Festival carrying two large yellow croakers as gifts.

The large yellow croaker, which once thrived in the shallow seas and estuaries along the coastal provinces, was nearly fished to extinction in the 1970s. Decades later, the number of the once-endangered species is close to its old peak, thanks to artificial reproduction efforts by Liu Jiafu, a grassroots aquaculturalist.

The revival of the fish stock not only helps villagers shake off poverty in Ningde, once an impoverished area, but also feeds the increasingly prosperous population's appetite for quality food－a long-standing challenge in China.