Thirty years on: the development of the Nile perch fishery in Lake Victoria

Abstract

Accounts of the introductions of the large centropomid piscivore, Nile perch, Lates niloticus, into the waters of Lake Victoria have been provided by a number of writers (see Reynolds and Gréboval, 1988, for a fuller review). There is a surprising vagueness in many of these accounts when it comes to the actual sequence of events and the main actors (or villains, depending on one’s point of view) involved. There is no doubt that the fish was placed into Lake Victoria at some point during the series of Nile perch transplantations to the Upper Nile-Lake Kyoga-Owen’s Falls Dam stretch of Nilotic waters, conducted by officials of the Uganda Game and Fisheries Department between 1954 and 1957 (Kinloch, 1972). Stock was captured from Lake Albert and the Nile below Murchison Falls. Unlike the earlier introductions of non-indigenous tilapiines beginning in 1953 (Welcomme, 1966;1967), the first placement of perch into Lake Victoria seems to have been carried out surreptitiously. It came as a surprise when the fish was discovered in waters close to Jinja (map, Chapter 2, Fig. 2.2) in May 1960, even as debate about whether the introduction ought to be carried out was continuing (EAFFRO, 1960; Fryer, 1960; Hamblyn, 1960; Anderson, 1961; Beadle, 1981). Two official‘deliberate’ introductions of Nile perch to Ugandan waters were later conducted in 1962 and 1963 (Gee, 1965).