Monkeys Are Made of Chocolate

by Jack Ewing

Then one day some European sport fishermen decided that the lake needed a good game fish. It was no fun to catch all the “trash fish” that the locals fished for food. So they released a non-native species called the Nile perch, a real sport fish, into Lake Victoria. Now they had a fish that was fun to catch, a strong fighter that could reach the length of a tall man and twice the weight. A voracious eater, the perch ate its way through the cichlids like a hungry young boy in a cookie jar. In half a century the Nile perch has eaten over 200 species of Lake Victoria cichlids into extinction. The algae eaters were some of the first to disappear, and possibly none of them are left. Lake Victoria became choked with algae, which consumes much of the oxygen, leaving less for the fish and causing many to die. The rotting plant material accumulated and the decomposition process took even more oxygen, and soon the bottom-feeders died too. Later the shallow portions of the lake became choked with water hyacinth, another non-native species, this one from the Amazon. The thick mats of broad pads of this invasive species are so dense that local fishermen can’t force their boats through them. Malaria carrying mosquitos breed in them as does a snail that carries a terrible parasite called Bilharzia. Three million people who live around the lake have been deprived of their livelihood, and it all began with the introduction of the Nile perch. Lake Victoria has been called the worst ecologic...