How to manage fish within and after the 10-year fishing ban

The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world, is one of the world's hotspots of biodiversity. This river was a cradle for the evolution of endemic cyprinid fish and the home of "living fossil" animals. It owns 424 fish species (of which 183 are endemic) and two mammals, the Baiji dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) and the Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis). In its middle and lower reaches, the river is or was connected with numerous shallow lakes where fish feed on abundant food resources. In the turbid river, the primary production is extremely low, e.g., the abundance of planktonic prey in the river is less than 1/7 of that in the adjacent lakes.1 Thus, many fish evolved habits of migration, feeding in lakes while breeding in the river. However, when blocked by dams, the turbid river itself can only support a small fish population and fails to receive fish replenishment from the isolated lakes, eventually leading to a collapse of fish stocks as well as their mammalian predators in the river.