Once upon a time, the Dongting Lake, a flood-basin of the Yangtse River, was China's largest freshwater lake. Now it's in danger of drying up. Is the Three Gorges Dam to blame?
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Results tagged “dongtinglake”
CNN's Eunice Yoon reporting on China's historic drought from the dried-up basin of Dongting Lake
The race to build the Great Mice Wall
OK, we all know about the Great Wall, the Great Firewall and the Great Green Wall. All that is old news now. Get this: China is now building a 6 million yuan, 40-kilometer (25-mile) long, 1 meter (3.3 feet) high wall around Dongting Lake in Hunan Province to guard against the 2 billion field mice that have been on the run from the flooded Yangtse River. Already, the mice have destroyed about 520,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of crop land when rising water drove them from their burrows. And even the enterprising businessmen in Guangdong who sought to help by bringing the mice en masse to the dinner table did little to mitigate the situation.
How would you like your rat done, sir?
Whenever there is a crisis or a natural calamity, there are the people who lose money and then there are the entrepreneurs. It seems enterprising businessmen have decided to cash in on an outbreak of rodents in the Dongting Lake area in Hunan province which saw an estimated 2 billion mice on the run from the flooded Yangtse River by taking the matter into their own hands - literally.
Not your run-of-the-mill rat race
Forget Ratatouille, this is the real thing: an estimated 2 billion field mice are on the run in the areas surrounding Dongting Lake (洞庭湖) in Hunan province. The mass migration was caused by the flooding of the Yangtze River in late June. Since then, as you can see from the news report in the video, people have been busy trying to control the mice by both erecting walls and barriers and also by trying to kill them. However, according to reports they've only managed to exterminate 2.25 million of them (or 90 tons of mice), a mere 1/1000 of the total.
Somebody turn on the a/c, please!
*Image from Rob Stevens: The bed of the Dongting Lake in Yueyang, China dries and cracks as the region experiences one of the worst droughts in over a century.
Today's Links: Hookers, jellyfish and the finless porpoise
"In China, there’s more precedent for blogging getting people in trouble with the police than there is for blogging in itself getting one getting fired. So what happens to cops who blog?"
"The company, Lunar Embassy to China, had sold a total of 49 acres (20 hectares) to 34 customers before authorities acted, Xinhua news agency said."
"A Chinese government audit has found that local officials have misused $4 billion in social security funds that are meant to provide a safety net for China's growing population of retirees."
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Photo by monkeyking found via the Shanghaiist Contribute page.more ›
"They used to inhabit in large numbers the main trunk of the Yangtze River, but with the expansion of human economic activity and large-scale sand dredging, they have been squeezed into Poyang Lake and Dongting Lake, where they are only just surviving."
"We were stuck on the train for about five minutes as only about half of the cars were in the station, and I could see people on the platform outside taking pictures of something in the front of the train, but when I asked an attendant what had happened he said “nothing” (没什么事)."
"Fish lovers in the city could find it much easier, and perhaps cheaper, to raise jellyfish at home this year thanks to the work of a postgraduate student at Shanghai Fisheries University."
"When Cheng's boyfriend found out about the deal, he asked if Jiang looked wealthy. When the women said yes, the boyfriend, Fang Xiao, allegedly said earning money from prostitution was too slow so he wanted to rob the man, prosecutors said."
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Photo by monkeyking found via the Shanghaiist Contribute page.
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