Lungfish risk clouds $2bn dam plan
3 Comments
Greg Roberts
January 02, 2008
THE $2 billion Traveston Dam proposal, which is a cornerstone of the Queensland Government’s strategy to drought-proof the southeast of the state, is under a cloud after a commonwealth study raised doubts about a “fishway” built to save the endangered Australian lungfish.
An audit by the federal Department of Environment has questioned whether a fishway that allows the fish to travel up and downstream over the Paradise Dam, on the Burnett River near Bundaberg, is operating effectively. The lungfish occurs naturally only in the Burnett River and further south in the Mary River, where the Traveston Dam is planned near Gympie.
The world’s oldest vertebrate animal, the Australian lungfish has existed for 150 million years.
Approval for the dam will be among new Environment Minister Peter Garrett’s first major decisions. Commonwealth approval is required for all projects that have the potential to threaten lungfish. The fishway was crucial to a 2002 decision by the Howard government to approve the 300,000-megalitre Paradise Dam.
And a similar fishway is planned for the Traveston Dam. Mr Garrett will soon consider an environmental impact statement commissioned by the Bligh Government in Queensland before determining if the dam can be built.
Fishways work by trapping fish moving upstream or downstream to breed in compartments, which are lifted over dam walls. The dams would otherwise block the movement of fish.
The draft audit of the Paradise Dam fishway indicates that dry conditions have impeded its ability to move lungfish over the 37m dam wall since the device began operating in 2006.
Although the dam was completed in 2005, it is just 16 per cent full because of the drought.
Problems with the fishway were admitted in a statement by the dam’s state government-owned operator, SunWater, to The Australian.
The device was “not currently operating at full capacity due to minimal rainfall in the region, which has left Paradise Dam at very low levels”, SunWater said. The statement added that when dam levels allowed, the fishway would be fully operational.
Mr Garrett said his department was negotiating with SunWater about the fishway and other matters raised by the audit before a report is released later this month. The Queensland Department of Primary Industries principal scientist Peter Kind said that during seven days of monitoring the Paradise Dam, four lungfish were among an estimated 150,000 fish that passed through the fishway.
“It needs water to operate and conditions are dry, but we are encouraged with what we are seeing so far,” Dr Kind said.
“Historically, the Burnett has been reduced to chains of pools at times and the lungfish has survived.”
Lungfish expert and Macquarie University researcher Jean Joss said that although lungfish had evolved to survive drought, dams would permanently impair their ability to move up and down rivers to find breeding sites.
stevem
‘We’re green, but lungfish ain’t that rare’
January 03, 2008
THE site of the Queensland Government’s controversial Traveston Crossing Dam is flooding but debate over its merits has reignited over measures to protect rare marine species.
The Federal Government will this month decide whether to give the go-ahead to the dam, to be built on the Mary River near Gympie, north of Brisbane.
The State Government claims enough rain has fallen in the river’s catchment to fill the dam four times since September 2007.
It says recent rains caused by an intense low pressure system off the southeast Queensland coast have the river running at a rate that would fill three Olympic swimming pools a minute.
But it is strongly opposed by locals, who object to the flooding of fertile farming land, and conservationists who fear for three rare species in the river.
Among them is the lungfish, a species that has been around for more than 300 million years.
Queensland Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald has cast doubts over the project’s fishways - lifts that would capture lungfish and carry them over the dam walls, allowing them to move to breeding grounds.
Senator Macdonald said an audit of the Paradise Dam near Bundaberg, in central Queensland, would reveal the failure of such fish lifts.
The Paradise Dam’s operator SunWater has admitted problems with the device, due to dry conditions.
But Acting Queensland Premier Paul Lucas said a proposed $35 million conservation centre and other measures would protect the lungfish.
He said lungfish weren’t as rare as made out, as they also lived in the Burnett, North Pine and Brisbane Rivers.
“We take environmental issues very seriously,” Mr Lucas said.
“That’s why we’re investing $35 million in the freshwater species conservation centre.”
The Environmental Impact Statement is open for public comment until January 14.
stevem
Lungfish navigation mechanism ‘never worked’
Posted Thu Jan 3, 2008
Water manager Sunwater has conceded its mechanism at Paradise Dam to help fish navigate the dam wall has never worked in both directions.
The fish ways were designed to assist vulnerable fish including the rare lungfish to continue to travel through the system.
An environmental group is calling for the Federal Government to release an audit into the Burnett River Dam before similar measures are considered for a proposed dam on the Mary River.
Acting chief executive Peter Boettcher says fish are able to travel up stream but not down stream.
“It”s designed to operate at between 57 per cent and 100 per cent capacity and the current level of the dam is at 15 per cent,” he said.
“We would probably need about 100,000 megalitres of flow before we’re in a position to operate that.”
Sunwater says Paradise Dam’s capacity peaked in January 2006 at 31 per cent.
stevem
Lungfish a breed apart
By Phil Hammond
January 03, 2008
QUEENSLAND lungfish may be regarded as unusual and totally protected, but Gordon Hides has about 7000 of them.
“We have worked out how to breed them where the scientists couldn’t,” said Hides, who with his wife, Linda, operates the world’s only commercial lungfish farm at Howard, near Maryborough.
And they export young lungfish to fish fanciers all over the world at $500 each.
“There’s been a lot of talk, with scientists getting on the bandwagon, about the Traveston dam killing lungfish and making them extinct and it’s a whole lot of garbage,” he said.
Hides, 67, said scientists had said female lungfish laid 100 eggs which were individually fertilised by the male.
“That’s poppycock,” he said. “One big old female can lay 15,000 eggs and it would be impossible for the male to fertilise them all. They are pea-sized eggs, and in the wild, everything from insects to fish and snakes will eat them.
“When the young hatch, they lie on their sides for the first couple of weeks, hardly moving at all, and sometimes they go back into their eggs.”
The Hides feed algae and black worms to the fry and for the first month, they are slow growers. After 12 months, the lungfish are 30cm long.
Working with Department of Primary Industries officers, Hides said the biggest lungfish he had seen was a 1.4m specimen, probably 100 years old.
When the young reach about 15cm long, they are individually placed in plastic boxes, kept wet and shipped to public aquariums, commercial marine attractions, private collectors and scientific establishments worldwide.
“We’ve never lost one,” he said. “We sell over the internet to collectors in South Africa, Germany, the United Kingdom, Thailand, Korea and the US. Japan is our biggest market.” Recently, British wildlife filmmaker Sir David Attenborough visited the Hides’ 5ha property with its array of concrete tanks, to film lungfish for his latest nature series, Life in Cold Blood.
Reaching this point has been a long haul for the Hides.
“We pestered the government for nearly 20 years before we got a licence to breed lungfish, then it was another five years of applications to get an export licence,” he said.
In 2001, the couple achieved the first of four successful spawnings. They have 10 large breeding lungfish and another 10 “future breeders”. The fourth and most recent spawning has given the couple young lungfish worth about $3.5 million.
Now they’re ready for a break. At 67, Hides’ health is failing.
“We have not had a day off for 10 years,” he said.
“You’re sitting there waiting for them to breed. There’s some stress in it all and we are not getting any younger.”
If you’ve a lazy $1.5 million, the Hides would like to hear from you. Visit their lungfish website: www.ceratodus.com
stevem
Dam fish fix won’t save species: expert
Gabrielle Dunlevy
January 7, 2008
Australia’s pre-eminent lungfish expert has slammed the Queensland government’s measures to protect the rare species living at the site of the proposed Traveston Crossing Dam.
The federal government will soon decide whether to give the go-ahead to the $2 billion dam, to be built on the Mary River near Gympie, north of Brisbane.
The project has been controversial since its inception, with locals angered about the flooding of valuable farming land, and others fearing the loss of rare species, including the lungfish.
Professor Jean Joss, of Macquarie University’s Australian Lungfish Laboratory, has joined others concerned over fish lifts - devices designed to allow lungfish to negotiate the dam wall in order to breed.
SunWater, the operators of the Paradise Dam, near Bundaberg in central Queensland, has admitted problems with fish lifts, due to low water levels.
Prof Joss said low water levels were expected in the huge Traveston dam for years - so risking the survival of the world’s oldest vertebrate animal with a failing device was “absurd”.
“All they have said so far to me is that they intend making the same sort of fish lift as on the Paradise Dam,” she told AAP.
“That to me seems totally absurd, because it’s a totally different dam.”
Prof Joss said the Queensland government had been unwilling to examine lift designs that were used with success in Europe and would be better suited to the new dam.
“The Mary is a big, wide river valley and the Traveston wall … is going to be more than two kilometres long,” she said.
“That’s a very different set-up, and to put one fish lift in one place seems quite absurd to me, when it hasn’t been shown to work.”
Prof Joss has agreed to join the government’s Freshwater Species Conservation Centre, one of the proposed mitigation measures for the dam.
But she remains strongly opposed to the dam project.
“(Former Queensland premier) Peter Beattie was still in charge (when the dam was announced) and I could see that he was absolutely determined to have that particular dam,” Prof Joss said.
“I’m just as determined to save the lungfish.
“If we want to have an understanding of how we (humans) eventually ended up ourselves as vertebrates, and went on to land, it’s the only animal that can give us that information.”
AAP
View Printer Friendly Version
Reader Comments (3)
For lungfish the issue with both dams is not just passage, it is also the inability for its essential breeding habitat to be stabilised because of fluctuating water levels. Scientific reports to this effect have been placed with the senate inquiry in june 2007 , Burnett Water Pty Ltd ( now sunwater) has failed to stabilise water levels to accomodate breeding habitat and QWI are the same dudes who did Paradise , so why give a mob of engineers approval to repeat thier mistakes at Traveston? , they dont get the meaning of ecological mitigation because they are not ecologists , its as simple as that , you cannot trust them to get it right because their business is selling water not protecting a species in the water.
Paradise Dam on the Burnett River. This is still regarded as state-of-the-art, having been developed with the best knowledge available at the time and with significant expert input."
duuuuurrrrh , dursigned by experts. It"s designed to operate at between 57 per cent and 100 per cent capacity and the current level of the dam is at 15 per cent," he said.
"We would probably need about 100,000 megalitres of flow before we're in a position to operate that."
Sunwater says Paradise Dam's capacity peaked in January 2006 at 31 per cent."newtons law of gravity , durh what goes up stream , cant come down"
WOW imagine if they got a real expert to make one for traveston, it would probably need 26mts of flow over the wall to operate!
There is good evidence that creation of lacustrine habitat by construction of weirs and dams leads to a net loss of suitable lungfish spawning habitat.
• The EPBC Variation of Approval ( EPBC 2001/422) required Burnett Water Pty Ltd to , “adhere to the environmental flow requirements specified in the Water Resource Plan * Burnett Basin ) 2000 and the Resource Operation Plan ( Burnett Basin) 2003 and the Burnett River Dam Flow Strategy for Lungfish dated 22 May 2003.
• The Burnett River Dam Flow Strategy for Lungfish has a specific ecological outcome which is recognized under the WRP , which is , “ Water is to be managed and allocated –
a) To maintain pool habitats , native plants and animals associated with habitats , in watercourses: and
b) to maintain long term water quality suitable for riverine and estuarine ecosystems; and
c) to provide flow regimes that favour native plants and animals associated with watercourses and riparian zones and
d) To provide wet season flow to benefit native plants and animals , including for example fish and prawns in estuaries : and
e) To improve stream flow conditions to assist the movement of fish along watercourses.
In particular for the Burnett River Basin and Burnett River the WRP states:
1) Water in the Burnett River is to be managed and allocated to provide for lungfish habitat in the river particularly habitat downstream of Gayndah at AMTD 200KM
“Operational water release from the dam must occur In a manner that enables the Environmental Flow Objectives and Indicators specified in the WRP to be achieved. As a result , the operation of the dam will promote the proposed ecological outcomes targeted by the WRP , including for lungfish habitat” , But did it achieve this?
The Queensland Environmental Protection Agency has noted in its “Final Report: Operation of the Ned Churchward Weir between 1998-2005, that , “ the report has been prepared in response to a request from Sunwater ( the operator who subsumed Burnett Water Pty Ltd) , for confirmation that they have fulfilled the monitoring requirements as part of the agreement between the commonwealth and State governments. The report focuses on the review of the Storage Operations Management Plan ( SOMP.)”
The report indicates that , “ a major ( not minor) omission in the SOMP process has been the failure to update the SOMP in light of new scientific data , particularly in relation to lungfish and macrophyte management. ( what Peter Kind is alluding to about lacrustine impoundments) .
This has meant that while Sunwater may have complied with the SOMP monitoring requirements, compliance itself was not achieving the biological goals for some of the SOMP elements , namely , to date there has been no successful spawning of lungfish with the Ned Churchward Weir.
“The importance of providing suitable habitat for lungfish spawning and recruitment was recognized right at the inception of the Weir project, with the Administrative Arrangements requiring that investigations were to be undertaken to establish requirements for the maintenance of lungfish breeding habitat and juvenile recruitment so that these could be incorporated into the operational rules for the weir ( specifically to stabilize water levels), there was an understanding then that operation of the Weir would be based on the results of studies subsequent to the construction of the weir and that rules would be changed to accommodate those results.
While the spawning habitat requirements of lungfish have been established through subsequent studies( Brooks and Kind 2002) , the reason behind complete failure of macrophytes to establish and provide habitat within the weir have not been addressed .As a priority the operating requirements to establish macrophytes beds need to be agreed by Sunwater with Macrophyte experts. Until appropriate spawning habitat can be established in the Weir and suitable stable water levels are maintained during spawning , incubation and hatching, lungfish populations in the weir will either fail to reproduce or will need to travel to suitable spawning habitat in unimpounded waters.
The ability for Lungfish to successfully travel upstream to unimpounded waters is compounded by the operators admission that the Burnett Dam Fishway can only operate during times of high flow and greater than 57% storage. The Burnett River Dam has only ever achieved 31 % capacity since commencement of operation.
2.1.2 OUTSTANDING ISSUES
The following issues have not been resolved over the life of the SOMP nor will they be resolved under current arrangements within the ROP
(a) No lungfish spawning or recruitment within the Ned Churchward Weir to date due to;
(b) Insufficient establishment of suitable macrophyte beds for lungfish spawning and recruitment
(c) lack of suitable substrate : and
(d) Egg mortality if spawning did occur ”
My conclusion :
This report gives a reasonable insight into the inability of the resource operator ( Sunwater) to implement the Burnett River Dam Flow Strategy for Lungfish May 2003 with particular reference to special ecological outcomes of the WRP (a) –(e) and (1)
• The failure on behalf of the operator ( Sunwater) to implement agreed water level stability management is , a demonstration of non compliance with the policy intent of the Lungfish Flow Strategy and it can successfully be argued as a non compliance of the EPBC Variation of Approval ( EPBC 2001/422) to , “adhere to the environmental flow requirements specified in the Water Resource Plan * Burnett Basin ) 2000 and the Resource Operation Plan ( Burnett Basin) 2003 and the Burnett River Dam Flow Strategy for Lungfish dated 22 May 2003.
So the core issue appears to be a combination of , "failure to mitigate for habitat using the flow strategy and a failure to mitigate for passage using the fishway " , both of which were required under the variation of approval . They have not met the conditons of approval for the variation and according to the EPA report it appears deliberate , maybe that is why Garrett is in 'negotiations'.