Re: “Govt seeks source of alien fish influx”, (BP, July 21). It was with incredulity that I read, “Govt seeks source of alien fish influx”. The source will never be found of course, since a predatory bird could have dropped a pregnant tilapia from high in the air — any newly formed body of freshwater in Thailand will soon be populated with fish in just this manner.
Of course, Agriculture and Cooperatives Minister Capt Thamanat Prompow may have some insight into fish smuggling, but the nonsense from government types didn’t stop there. Paying a higher price for the invasive fish to be caught will never eliminate them. Rather than using environmentally detrimental fish poison, electrofishing, or an army of local conventional fishermen, there are more effective biocontrol solutions available.
The sterile male release technique involves releasing sterile male fish into the population to compete with fertile males for spawning. The sterile males reduce reproduction, leading to population decline. The daughterless fish strategy is when genetically modified fish are released that only produce male offspring. This skews the sex ratio towards males, preventing reproduction and leading to population collapse. And the trojan Y chromosome method, similar to the daughterless fish approach, introduces a male-determining chromosome into the population to bias the sex ratio, thereby reducing reproductive efficiency. When the above biocontrol measures are combined with an interventional increase in predatory species (not the “white sea bass” mentioned in the article but the high-value Lates calcarifer or Asian sea bass, which is native to Thai waters), an effective and ongoing low-cost solution can be created.
Michael Setter
Gun distraction
Re: “Trust deficit”, (PostBag, July 21) and “Guns on US streets”, (PostBag, July 18).
I don’t wish to accuse Mr Setter of making things up yet again, but according to public safety data, last year Westminster had 163 — not 463 — crimes per 1,000 people. Most of those were muggings.
It’s quite typical of Americans to try and use this kind of irrelevance to distract from the 43,163 that died of gun-related injuries last year — more than ten times the per capita murder rate for the UK. Some may try and say the US is a more violent country than the UK, but the truth is probably that it’s far easier to kill someone with a gun than a knife or other weapon, and the US is infested with them. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who found it quite ironic that the assassination attempt on the NRA’s hero, Donald Trump, was carried out with a gun they’re so desperate to allow anyone to own.
Tarquin Chufflebottom
Mattress practice
Re: “Plans ‘needed to ease future outages’”, (BP, July 21).
One small computer bug and it’s a big disaster as the world shuts down, or so it seemed in the news reports. It has been decades since the blue screen of death was a common feature of our routine computer day, but it has returned with a vengeance. This event was a hassle, but it was unintentional. So what happens if there is an intentional attack? Most people have only a little cash available, so they might run out of food in a few days, and even worse, their streaming services could be affected. We need to increase our security levels and decrease our reliance on the online life we have built for ourselves.
We could turn our computers off every Thursday and practise. It might also be a good time to put a few dollars under the mattress.
Dennis Fitzgerald