Conserving Arowanas Needs More Than Releasing Fish, Part 2

Chapter 5: Burnt

Malaysia is the top exporter of Asian arowanas (Scleropages formosus), also known as dragon fish. This freshwater fish is one of the most expensive pet fish globally. It has been endangered in the wild for 50 years, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a wildlife trade treaty, but hundreds of thousands of them are raised in farms every year and sold worldwide.

Breeders, traders, and owners gush about the fullness of the fish’s fins and the shine of its scales. But when asked about the conservation of wild arowanas, they look confused. Ask Bey Thuan Wei, they would say.

Fortunately, Bey, a 43-year-old arowana breeder, was happy to talk and gave full access to his breeding facility in Bukit Merah. Wearing a pair of black-rimmed spectacles and knee-length shorts, Bey leaned on the rail of his balcony. He looked out at the lattice of rectangular dug-out ponds before him. His company owns 180 of such ponds, each with about 25 arowanas in its murky water. Somewhere in his facility is an albino golden arowana he claimed to have bought for RM1 million.

Behind Bey, photos of smiling clients and prize-winning arowanas adorn a wall. It has been 25 years since Bey left his restaurant business to trade ornamental fish and got hooked on breeding arowana.

“The thing about people who love to rear fish,” says Bey “is that while trading is just a business transaction [for us], it’s a wholly different achievement to raise the fish from eggs to adults.”

Bey dug his first arowana pond in 1999, when the arowana market was “just about to heat up,” he recalls. That year, a golden arowana with sparkling, silvery scales due to a rare mutation was sold for RM575,000 (inflation-adjusted RM955,000 now) in Tokyo. The next two years saw ornamental fish companies getting listed in the stock exchanges of Malaysia and Singapore. Bey saw a bright, lucrative future.

To export captive-bred Asian arowanas, one would need a CITES permit. To ease operations, Bey bought his parent stock of arowanas from CITES-registered facilities in Johor and Singapore. His stock reproduced and multiplied. In 2008, he set up the Golden Arowana Breeding Farm company and acquired CITES registration four years later.

Bey was but one of the scores of arowana breeders who charged into the industry in the 2000s. The farming center is in Bukit Merah, where wild arowanas once abounded. There, arowana farms replaced paddy fields along a 3km stretch of a canal west of the lake. By 2011, there were 70 arowana farms in Bukit Merah, up from fewer than 10 before 2000.

Malaysia was not alone. Arowana marked for commercial trade and exported from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore skyrocketed from 1,100 in 1993 to nearly 90,000 in 2010. Japan had been the biggest import market since 1993, but China was catching up fast.

Then the arowana business crashed. Arowana export prices peaked in 2011, breeders recall. The rapid and simultaneous expansion of arowana farms dumped a glut of Asian arowana into the market. Prices plummeted. But the arowanas in the ponds continued to mate, and breeders kept selling more fish, pushing prices down even more.

Today arowana breeding has become “a very tough” business, says Bey. Other breeders explain that thinning profit margins mean a misstep in cost-control could force a farm to sell its arowanas at a loss.

Traders are also struggling, says Alan Chan Yok Loong, 41. He blames the influx of online sellers. From his store in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Chan has been selling arowanas in Malaysia since 2012; he does not export.

In 2012, he would pay RM1,000 to buy a golden arowana from farms. Now he can get one for RM400. And for an imported red arowana, he can pay RM900 now instead of RM1,200 a decade ago. Whilst the lower prices are drawing more customers, Chan remains pessimistic.

His brick-and-mortar store is facing off against a slew of online sellers who are happy to earn RM50 a fish or are selling to cut losses. He also worries that most arowana farms would fold under pressure. “The price will only continue to drop,” he says. “We don’t see a future.”

Chan’s grim prediction is shared by other traders and arowana breeders. The eight breeders Macaranga spoke to in Bukit Merah expect many more farms to shut down in the next three years. Already, three of the nine farms Macaranga contacted have shut down or sold their operations.

But Bey is an astute businessman who spots the opportunities in crises. Low fish prices make it easier to persuade breeders to release captive fish to boost wild populations. It is a short-term loss in return for a much bigger catch: the US ornamental fish industry worth RM7.3 billion.

Since 1976, the US has prohibited imports of Asian arowanas through its Endangered Species Act. If local Asian arowanas are no longer threatened, exporters hope they could persuade US regulators to drop the ban.

Bey got to work. He was going to orchestrate the biggest release of captive-bred arowanas in Malaysia.

The Malaysian Arowana Friendship Club in Bukit Merah released their captive arowanas into the lake in 2018. Bey Thuan Wei hired a professional team from China to produce a documentary of their effort. (Video by PetView/YouTube: 

Chapter 6: Release

31 October, 2018. The day of the release had finally arrived. Bey and his colleagues had worked with the Department of Fisheries for a year on the arowana release. It was a historic day for the community and Lake Bukit Merah itself. That afternoon, the lake would receive a new cohort of 244 Asian arowanas. The fish were contributed by more than 40 farms in Bukit Merah, all members of the Malaysian Arowana Friendship Club of breeders.

The breeders lifted the arowanas from their ponds, packed them into water-filled plastic bags, and loaded them onto dozens of motorboats. Curious onlookers gathered at the jetty. Speakers hailed the day as the start of a conservation program. Next year they would release more arowanas, perhaps up to 500 fish.

With the speeches concluded, the crowd got into boats and headed towards two release sites at the more secluded northern half of the lake. They opened the bags and tipped the fish over the sides of the boats. Arowanas up to 60cm long dived into the copper-colored waters. Every splash marked a spike in arowana numbers in the lake. Everyone was smiling.

Virtually absent since 2000, Asian arowanas swam again in Lake Bukit Merah.

The excitement masked the circuitous route Bey took to get there. Months ago, his peers argued that their efforts would be wasted because anglers and fishermen would catch the released arowanas. While the local fishermen community had agreed to protect the arowanas, breeders were not entirely convinced. Bey understood their concern and admitted that the breeders could not enforce protection. Still, he plowed ahead.

A few years after the release, anglers were once again pulling arowanas out of Lake Bukit Merah, much to Bey’s delight. He clicks on a Facebook post from early January on his smartphone. It shows an angler, grinning and holding a large golden arowana he had just caught from the lake. Bey recognized it as a farm-bred arowana. The angler later returned the fish into the lake.

“Look, how fat and stout this arowana is,” says Bey. “It might have reproduced once or twice. So, wouldn’t you say our release was successful? I think it was.”

But few arowana breeders and traders share Bey’s optimism for arowana conservation. They choose their words carefully.

In Sungai Buloh, Selangor, arowana trader Sam Wong Wey Loon, 39, says that arowanas “are now everywhere [in farms and aquariums]. Why should they be protected? Better use the money to protect other animals.” Like the two other traders Macaranga spoke to, he does not think conservation matters to his arowana business. “No customer ever asked about conservation.”

There is one other arowana breeder in Bukit Merah who, like Bey, thinks that the industry should conserve wild arowanas. Henry Tan Shi Sung of PT Dragon Industry, 26, studied aquaculture and immunology in Taiwan. He returned in September 2023 to join the arowana business started by his grandfather.

Tan’s facility is similar to Bey’s. But while Bey trades in red, golden, and silver arowanas, Tan only has golden arowana. He speaks highly of their ‘blue-based golden arowana,’ a variety thought to be restricted to Bukit Merah. His father started the farm with wild golden arowanas he caught in the 1990s from streams north of the lake.

“We took them from the lake, so we should give back to the environment,” says Tan. He also expects that after a few decades of captive-breeding, their farm stock will lose their physical appeal or vigor. He foresees a need to breed their captive fish with wild ones to reinvigorate their varieties and “hit the market again.”

Tan’s company is one of the largest in Bukit Merah with about 400 ponds. They pull nets over the ponds harboring their most expensive fish, the albino golden arowanas, to keep them safe from otters.

Around Tan, the ponds are arranged in neat rows with coconut trees growing in between. Workers focus on separate parts of the operations. Some would clean the ponds, while others extract eggs from the males, incubate the fry, or raise them to 15cm long. Tan has a quarantine room in which he and his father nurse sick or genetically defective fish back to health. Every egg is precious, and they strive to raise each into a fish that could captivate a buyer.

Because they invest so much effort into every arowana, breeders dislike giving them away for conservation, even when prices hit bottom. Bey and his colleagues did not initiate another release. In 2022, the Department of Fisheries asked Bukit Merah breeders to contribute arowana for another release, this time in a smaller confined area closer to the fishermen's jetty. Breeders reluctantly complied with 75 fish.

“Nobody would want to donate all the time,” says Tan. “It’s our investment, our capital. Crudely speaking, it’s like dumping money into the sea.”

Tan’s colleagues echo his sentiment. They are paying the government for CITES permits and quarantine services, so why does the government not pay them to release arowanas? Perhaps RM500 per fish, one breeder suggested.

Macaranga posed the breeders’ request for government compensation to the Department of Fisheries. The Department said that industry’s contribution to conservation is a key part of the CITES framework and an explicit condition in the separate application to access the US market.

Furthermore, Director-General Adnan bin Hussain emphasized that the only revenue the Department collects from arowana breeders is the RM50 charge per CITES permit needed to export arowanas. The Department issued 6,445 of such permits between 2018 and 2022; the revenue is channeled into the federal government’s Consolidated Fund.

With CITES permit fees so low, funding for conservation efforts currently must be found elsewhere. Industries that profited from wildlife trade should step up, says Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. She argues that legislation would be necessary to compel industries to pay.

Besides money matters, breeders are also irritated that they are asked to release more arowanas when they cannot tell if those they have released are dead or alive.

“How can [the government] prove that the arowanas in the lake are increasing? What data can you show me? How are you monitoring the fish?” says Tan. “What’s the protection for the arowana? Those are my questions for the government.”

Chapter 7: Is home safe?

Tan’s question is valid. Who has been monitoring the numbers and health of the released arowanas in Lake Bukit Merah?

So far, nobody.

One might think that it is too laborious to track the fate of 300 arowanas in a vast lake. But ecologists have a simple get-around to estimate population sizes. It is called the mark-recapture method.

The idea is simple: You catch some fish, mark them in a harmless way, release them, and then catch fish again. The more marked fish you recapture in the second round, the smaller the actual fish population. It’s akin to bumping into your friend after you part ways in a mall: the more crowded the mall, the less likely you are to spot her again.

The mark-recapture method would have worked well for monitoring arowanas in Bukit Merah. That is because they were already marked. Before they released the arowanas, breeders had inserted a mini tag into each. When a special antenna is passed over the fish, it reads the tag’s unique serial number and identifies the fish.

When asked, the Department of Fisheries said that they will conduct a mark-recapture study on arowanas in Lake Bukit Merah in the future.

“If no monitoring is done, then there’s no point to releasing the fish,” says fisheries researcher Amy Then of Universiti Malaya.

Surveys of arowana populations will reveal if the released fish are reproducing. That is crucial for future conservation status assessments. The IUCN Red List, which assessed the Asian arowana as endangered in 2019, would not include released individuals in any future assessment of the species’ conservation status “until they have successfully reproduced in the wild,” says Craig Hilton-Taylor, Head of the Red List Unit at IUCN.

Furthermore, monitoring can flag current and future threats to the arowanas. They live in dangerous waters. For one, locals claim that “outsiders” have fished and killed arowanas, though perhaps unintentionally. Mohd Fadzil bin Din, 45, the de facto leader of the Bukit Merah fishermen community, says that the Perak government has not gazetted protection for Asian arowana in its state fisheries regulation. 

“When people take [arowanas], there’s no enforcement from Fisheries. They don’t have the power yet. Neither do we fishermen. Nobody has.”

Look upstream

Habitat loss poses another severe but insidious threat to arowanas and the entire lake ecology. Forest loss by the lake and its upstream Sungai Kurau began in the early 1990s, according to 64-year-old local fisherman Johar bin Bakar. Satellite imagery suggests that most forests were cleared by 2001.

The sparse canopy of oil palm plantations is a poor shield for the soil. When it rains, which it often does in Bukit Merah, torrents of soil wash into the lake and river, says Johar. Erosion turns the rivers and lake murky and blankets their depths in dirt. These conditions disrupt the ecology of small fishes which arowanas prey upon.

The health of a lake depends on its upstream rivers and forests, says aquatic ecologist Fatimah binti Yusoff of Universiti Putra Malaysia. That is particularly true of Lake Bukit Merah. It was created by damming two rivers. Lake and river fishes eat aquatic insects which in turn graze on plankton and the detritus that comes from the forest. Fatimah says that rivers need riparian forests at least 50m wide to sustain their ecology. Without these, rivers run short of food and energy.

Yet, most of the bank along a 12km stretch of Sungai Kurau upstream of the lake looks barren. This contradicts the guidelines from the Department of Irrigation and Drainage of at least 20m of forested riverside. Furthermore, Macaranga located five sand-mining sites on Sungai Kurau.

The Department of Fisheries acknowledges the threats of forest loss and sand mining around Lake Bukit Merah. “We have little choice but to conserve arowanas there as it is their original habitat,” says Director-General Adnan bin Hussain. “We have raised these issues with the Perak state government. We hope they realize the importance of the environment.”

The Department of Irrigation and Drainage and the Perak Chief Minister’s Office have not responded to Macaranga’s questions.

Chapter 8: Hope

“Arowana is a sad story,” says Fatimah. She laments not just exploitation of the fish but also that of the rivers and lakes in the country. A 2010 review of freshwater fish in Malaysia found that 30% of the 470 species were more than moderately threatened. In Selangor and Perak, habitat loss, pollution, and overfishing have displaced 40—60% of fish species.

But there is hope. We have the time and words to write a happy ending for the Asian arowana story.

One key step is to protect Asian arowanas with the strongest possible laws in the country. Fishermen and scientists have questioned the government’s dedication to conservation when laws are yet inadequate.

The Department of Fisheries acknowledge this shortfall and are seeking to amend the Perak fisheries regulations (Kaedah-kaedah Perikanan Sungai Perak 1992). They want to list the Asian arowana as a protected species and to gazette the sanctuary. They submitted their proposal to the Perak State Law Office in October 2023.

It is also encouraging that wild Asian arowanas are still found outside of Bukit Merah in Malaysia. Scientists from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) have recently detected fragments of the fish’s DNA in lakes in Kedah. More surveys are expected as a team led by researcher Haslawati binti Baharuddin at the Department of Fisheries has just developed their own arowana DNA toolkit.

Anecdotes and social media postings also show green arowanas in Pahang and Johor. While green arowanas do not sell for much, they are threatened too.

As such, arowana conservation efforts must extend beyond Lake Bukit Merah too. Kedah is a priority as ichthyologist Sébastien Lavoué of USM thinks that with quick action, there is a “slim chance” of saving the wild arowanas in certain lakes.

But Bey the breeder argues that the best chance of conserving arowanas lies in Bukit Merah, the original home of Malaysia’s golden arowana. So, what is needed to make wild arowanas common in Bukit Merah, as they were a century ago?

More releases of farm arowanas would help in the short-run. But in the long-term, can we give the fish the environment it needs to thrive? One free from the upheavals of sandmining and soil erosion? One with lush forests on the bank that will house insects and small fish to feed the arowanas? Lake Bukit Merah once supported hundreds of fishermen; its waters still feed thousands of hectares of paddy fields. It has lots of untapped tourism potential. The Perak state government has much to gain and little to lose by conserving the ecology of the lake and its rivers, and thereby the arowanas within.

Conservation runs on motivation. Can we check and share arowana numbers? Breeders and fishermen would be happy to know the fruits of their labor.

In December, angler Mohamad Zuhril Hakim bin Zaili caught an arowana at the lake. At less than 30cm long, it was too small to be one of the released arowana. This must be one of their offspring born in the lake, Hakim thought. He remembered that profits from selling arowana paid for his wedding, and from that he was blessed with three children. Might there be a future where his children could enjoy the thrill of fishing wild arowanas?

Hakim released the young arowana on the spot. It swam into the shelter of the submerged plant roots.

Read Part 1 to walk back a century to when arowanas were a common food fish for locals and learn how it became popular as a pet fish.

Banner image: The golden arowana, especially this variety called "blue-based," is endemic to Bukit Merah and its surrounding areas / Credit YH Law via Macaranga.