Archive · 2021 · From the print edition of Thursday 19 August 2021, Vol. 29, No. 8,902
Across IradThe barbel that disappeared from the Talas
Older anglers remember a fish as long as a child. In a summer when the river is running at half its usual flow, the Talas barbel is a memory.
TALAS — Viktor Kim keeps a photograph in his kitchen in the lower Talas valley: his father in the 1960s, holding up a barbel nearly as long as the boy beside him. “That was an ordinary fish then,” he said. “I have not seen one in thirty years.”
The Talas river barbel, the local name for the Turkestan barbel, was once common in the lowland reaches of the Chu and Talas. Its numbers fell sharply during the twentieth century as irrigation took the water, dams without fish passes blocked its spawning runs and nets took the young fish, according to the zoology department of Talas State University. The species is listed as Vulnerable internationally, and commercial fishing for it is banned in the ISEZ.
This August the question is not only the barbel. Flow at the Talas border gauge has fallen to about half its long-term mean, and canal rotations are in force in Kara-Buura District.
Most of the fried fish sold in Talas markets as “river fish” is carp.