About Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences

Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences

Overview and Mandate

The Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, based in Jingzhou, Hubei Province, is the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences (CAFS) institute for the Yangtze River basin — China's longest river and the centre of its freshwater fisheries. It is one of the nine fisheries research institutes of CAFS, the national fisheries research academy founded in 1978 under the Ministry of Agriculture, and it hosts the Key Laboratory of Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Its remit covers the fisheries resources of the Yangtze system and their conservation: the river's fish fauna, its endangered endemic species, the genetics and breeding of its farmed fishes, and the scientific monitoring on which Yangtze fisheries policy — above all the ten-year fishing ban in force since 2021 — depends.

The institute works at Jingzhou, in the middle reaches of the river, where it maintains experimental stations including the Jingzhou Experimental Station and the Yaowan Experimental Station and seed multiplication farm, while its research groups also publish from a Wuhan address, reflecting its presence in the provincial capital. Its scientists are known internationally above all for one subject: the sturgeons of the Yangtze, and the long effort to keep the Chinese sturgeon from extinction.

Historical Roots in Shashi and Jingzhou

The institute's roots lie in the fisheries research organised at Shashi — the historic river port now part of Jingzhou — in the early decades of the People's Republic. Scientific histories of Chinese biology record that in 1961 the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute at Shashi began cooperation in breeding a carp nucleus–crucian cytoplasm hybrid fish, and that three years later the collaborators had successfully obtained a reproducible hybrid variety that grew fast. The episode is characteristic of the institute's early work: the Yangtze's carps were the foundation of Chinese freshwater aquaculture, and improving them through hybridisation and selection was a national priority in which the Jingzhou institute was a central participant.

When CAFS was formed in 1978 as the national fisheries academy, the Yangtze institute became its basin institute for the river, alongside the Heilongjiang and Pearl River institutes for the other great river systems. Its position on the middle Yangtze placed it beside the river's most productive fisheries and its most famous conservation problem: the spawning migrations of the Chinese sturgeon, whose route upstream was cut by the Gezhouba Dam in the early 1980s.

Chinese Sturgeon Conservation

The Chinese sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis), a critically endangered species described in China as a national treasure comparable to the giant panda, is the institute's signature responsibility. The Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute in Jingzhou is one of the agencies charged with breeding Chinese sturgeon in captivity in order to restore the river population before the species disappears. Together with the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Hydro-ecology of the Ministry of Water Resources and the Chinese Sturgeon Research Institute of the Three Gorges Group, it has collaboratively monitored Chinese sturgeon spawning since the 1980s.

The institute's experts have been public voices of that programme. Its researcher Wei Qiwei argued in the 1990s that the most effective way to increase the rare fish was to breed and release young sturgeons above ten centimetres in length, because smaller fry suffered very low survival; in December of that era the institute's approach was demonstrated when 100,000 artificially bred young sturgeons above that size were released into the Yangtze in Hubei — the first release on such a scale. Releases have continued into the ban era: on 28 March 2021, at Jingzhou, more than 3,000 captive-bred sturgeons were released into the middle Yangtze, including 2,020 Chinese sturgeons and 1,000 Dabry's sturgeons, in an event jointly launched with CAFS. Wei Qi of the academy noted at the release that about seven million captive-bred Chinese sturgeons had been released into the Yangtze since 1983.

The monitoring record the institute helps keep has also delivered the programme's gravest findings. A CAFS report in 2014 documented a reproduction rate of zero for Chinese sturgeon in the Yangtze in 2013 — the first time no natural reproduction had been found since monitoring began thirty-two years earlier — underscoring why the institute's captive-breeding and release work, and the river-wide fishing ban its scientists advocated, are treated as a race against extinction.

Yangtze Sturgeon and the Rebuilding of Wild Populations

The institute's second sturgeon is Dabry's sturgeon, also called the Yangtze sturgeon (Acipenser dabryanus), a purely freshwater endemic that lost its natural ability to reproduce after 2000 and was declared extinct in the wild by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2022. The institute maintains captive populations of the species — its Jingzhou facilities hold the F2 generation offspring of captive-bred Yangtze sturgeon used in published research on pre-release conditioning, in which adjusting the gut microbial community of captive fish by diet training is tested as a way to improve their fitness after release.

In 2023 the institute took part, with other research units, in the first Yangtze River Sturgeon Population Reconstruction Experiment, at the Jiang'an section of the river at Yibin in Sichuan. Twenty male and female Yangtze sturgeon broodstock were placed in the river and guided to spawn naturally by regulating flow speed and simulating the spawning riverbed environment, and fry were successfully hatched. In March 2024 the experiment continued on a transformed spawning ground of more than 20,000 square metres of natural open water at Zhudao in Jiang'an, with flow-velocity construction, geological improvement and water diversion applied to the riverbed; the sturgeon spawned naturally in the modified ground. The result — natural reproduction by a species extinct in the wild — is regarded as an important step in rebuilding its wild population, and the Jingzhou institute is one of the scientific teams behind it.

Carp Breeding and the Changfeng Silver Carp

The institute's production research centres on the farmed carps of the Yangtze. Since 1986 it has served as the state-level genetic breeding centre for silver carp and has undertaken the breeding of new silver carp varieties, in response to a real production problem: the quality of farmed silver carp seed had degenerated, with slow growth and poor performance reported by farmers. Its researchers, in the aquaculture and genetic breeding research office led in this work by research fellow Liang Hongwei, developed gynogenetic silver carp strains that can be sustainably reproduced through the few males appearing in the second gynogenetic generation, combined with molecular marker-assisted selection.

From 2010 the institute conducted breeding tests of the resulting new variety, named Changfeng silver carp, across many provinces including Hubei, Shaanxi and Zhejiang. In May 2020 the institute announced in Jingzhou that, through thirty-five years of continuous research by three generations of fisheries experts, the breeding of the new silver carp variety had achieved staged success, described as world-leading; farmers from Jingzhou and surrounding districts were already buying the new fry at the institute's testing ground in Yaowan Village. Silver carp is one of the four major Chinese carps, and a genetically improved variety developed over three and a half decades is among the institute's most consequential contributions to freshwater aquaculture.

Fisheries Resources and Biodiversity Research

Through its Key Laboratory of Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation, the institute studies the Yangtze's wild fish communities: the population genetics, length–weight relationships and conservation status of the basin's species, and the changes imposed by dams, overfishing and the fishing moratorium. Its researchers have documented the basin's invasion problem, identifying around thirty exotic fish species — predominantly channel catfish, tilapia, mosquitofish and largemouth bass — in the Yangtze River Basin in surveys from 2017 to 2020, and have modelled how the invasion risk of largemouth bass expands northward under multiple influences. Rare-species biology is continuous work: institute teams have characterised pathogens of rare Yangtze fishes such as Rhinogobio ventralis held at its Jingzhou Experimental Station, where an Aeromonas veronii strain causing disease in the species was isolated and studied.

The institute's scientific standing in Yangtze conservation is reflected in the fishing-ban debate. Professor Wei Qiwei — Qiwei Wei in Western name order — of the institute was among the academicians whose proposal led to the ten-year fishing ban on the Yangtze that China began on 1 January 2021, a policy whose scientific monitoring, including the assessment of recovering fish resources, forms a large part of the institute's current environment.

Aquatic Animal Health and Food Safety Research

Beyond conservation, the institute conducts applied research for the aquaculture industry on drug use and fish health. Its scientists have built population pharmacokinetic models for the antibiotic enrofloxacin in largemouth bass after intravenous and oral administration, and have assessed withdrawal intervals for enrofloxacin in yellow catfish after multiple oral administrations at different temperatures — the residue science on which safe drug use in freshwater aquaculture depends. This work is carried out with partners including the Freshwater Fisheries Research Center at Wuxi and the Agro-Environmental Protection Institute in Tianjin, within the CAFS and CAAS systems.

Place in the Yangtze Protection Era

The Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute embodies the transformation of Chinese freshwater fisheries science. Founded to improve the carps that fed the country's pond aquaculture — a task it still pursues through the Changfeng silver carp — it has become, in the era of the ten-year ban, primarily a conservation institute: breeder of last resort for two critically endangered sturgeons, keeper of the spawning-monitoring record that measures the river's decline and recovery, and a scientific author of the ban itself. Its combination of basin mandate, key laboratory, experimental stations and broodstock facilities at Jingzhou makes it one of the central institutions of the Yangtze protection programme.