Heiko Bleher Candidly On South American Amazon Watershed Disaster
I had the opportunity to meet with Heiko Bleher in Illinois as a guest of Greg Wittstock at Aquascape. We met after the day was done and Mr. Bleher spent a great deal of time with a small group of three people illuminating the crisis in the Amazon.
There’s a LOT we don’t get told here in the United States and one of those things is the evaporation of a LOT of lakes and rivers on the planet. A function of Global Warming or the end of an Ice Age or both. But there are lakes in Europe that once held considerable biodiversity in aquarium fish that are now nearly extinct.
He saw a LOT of South America and the Amazon Basin when it was pristine in the 70’s. And now he goes back, and most of those areas are populated as cities and the rest is being mined, clear cut or polluted vastly.
In South America the situation is DIRE because a lack of proper waste treatment and a burgeoning population is putting STRATOSPHERIC amounts of garbage and raw sewage into the Amazon. And decimating populations of fish. He shows pictures of a sea of plastic packaging, containers, refuse and opaque water rushing to the ocean.
I am very glad he shows video and pictures of what’s happening.
Rainforest clear-cutting is silting the Amazon and extincting species as fast as they’re discovered.
The freshwater dolphin is threatened.
Heiko was a pioneer for the aquarium fish trade in the seventies and eighties. He saw a LOT of South America and the Amazon Basin when it was pristine. And now he goes back, and most of those areas are populated as cities and the rest is being mined, clear cut or polluted vastly. Most of the species he catalogued are extinct. He told me about a red tail gouramy that was stunning in multiple colors, before he could get back to collect some, the region was clearcut and the species was “done”. He showed me a picture. It would have been called Osphrenemus rainbowii. If you named it by looks. The “white” areas you see on some Red Tail Giants was absolutely pearlescent in those Goramy.
So I said all that to say THIS: I was delighted when I got on Youtube and found his video that delves into this, WITH PICTURES. If you didn’t see it, you would NOT believe it.
Heiko Bleher Candidly On South American Watershed Disaster
The sound volume is low, but the words are as important as they are quiet.
