THE FISH OF ISSYK-KUL/ a conservation story

My father used to fish in the middle of the night.

No rods. Just a spear and a light.

In the dark, the eyes of the fish lit up.

RELI 230 · Climate / Conservation Solution

The Fish of Issyk-Kul

I am Yrysray, one of the people who live by the lake. This is the story of what our lake lost, and of who is trying to bring it back.

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01

Night Fishing

I was about seven years old.

My father used to go fishing in the middle of the night, and as a kid I did not understand why. You can't see anything, and it is dangerous. I thought he only went at night because he was busy with work during the day. Then he told me something that surprised me: night fishing has a different purpose, and you can actually catch more fish. I did not believe him until he showed me.

We didn't take any fishing rods, just a spear and a light. My father said that was the whole point. I was sure he wouldn't catch even one fish with that spear. It was summer, so the water was warm enough to stay in for a while. We walked through the shallow water with the light, hunting.

The fish's eyes lit up in the dark, and so did the eyes of the frogs and bats. That scared me a lot, because they all seemed to be looking straight at me. My father told me to be quiet because the fish could hear my voice and my questions. I know now that isn't really true. He just wanted me to stop talking and focus on the fish.

Move the light over the water

When we found a few fish, we moved closer, as close as the reach of the spear. We flashed the light to see exactly where they were, and turned it off right before the strike. It worked. I could see how big the fish were and how they moved in the water, and I felt happy, almost ecstatic, that you could fish like that. My father learned this from my grandfather when he was twelve or fifteen.

Today you cannot fish with a spear anymore. The chebak are gone from the shore. This page is about why.
02

The Fish

The ones that were here first, and the ones that were brought in. Tap a fish.

Native to Issyk-Kul · found nowhere else

Brought in · predators

03

What the Lake Lost

A plan to make the lake “better.”

  1. 1930

    Sevan trout released

    Soviet scientists release 755,000 trout eggs from Armenia into Issyk-Kul, and 800,000 more in 1936. They saw the native fish as small, bony and not worth much money. Here the trout grew up to 17 kg, compared with about 4 kg at home, and laid five to six times more eggs.

  2. 1954–56

    Pikeperch and bream added

    A second predator arrives. Too many predators and too few prey fish: the lake's total fish production actually drops (Alamanov & Mikkola, 2011). Only about 3% of Soviet fish introductions before 1978 ever paid off (Bogdanowicz et al., 2017). The trout was one of the rare “successes.” Back in Armenia, dams and poaching wrecked its spawning grounds, and it is now endangered in its own homeland.

  3. 1980s

    Rainbow trout escape

    Trout start escaping from cage farms in the lake and spread everywhere. Fishermen and environmentalists blame them for more damage to the native fish (Blua, 2010).

  4. 1991

    The collapse

    The USSR falls. My father saw the biggest change here: the fishing industry became a business, everyone was fishing, and nobody enforced the rules. The research says the same: overfishing, mass poaching, hatcheries with no money.

  5. 2008

    Native fish hatcheries

    A UNDP project starts raising marinka and osman in mobile hatcheries to release into the lake.

  6. 2023

    Fishing ban

    Kyrgyzstan bans commercial fishing in Issyk-Kul and Son-Kul for three years.

  7. 2026

    Ban extended to 2029

    The fish still have not come back, so the ban is extended (24.kg).

My father says the chebak moved deep into the lake to escape the predators. That is why spear fishing by the shore no longer works. My family's memory and the research tell the same story: the predators weakened the lake for decades, and the 1990s pushed it over the edge.

04

The Third Pressure

Predators, then overfishing. Now, climate change.

0%

of Kyrgyzstan's glacier area lost in the last 50 years

0%

more could disappear by 2050, and the glaciers may be gone by 2100

0°C

of warming in Kyrgyzstan in just two decades, faster than the global average

0%

of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from Kyrgyzstan

Najibullah & RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service, 2023. Winter has also shrunk from 95 to 71 days, and summer has grown from 145 to 154.

Issyk-Kul has no river flowing out of it, so the only way water leaves is by evaporating, which makes the lake very sensitive to warming. It is fed by rivers that come down from the glaciers of the Tien Shan. Over the last 80 years, the temperature around the lake rose by 0.7 to 1.5°C and rainfall dropped by 45 to 130 mm, and these changes moved the lake's water level (Salamat et al., 2015). Farmers diverting rivers for irrigation have lowered it even more.

This feels unfair to me. Kyrgyzstan produces only about 0.03% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. We barely caused the problem, but we are living with it.

The marinka spawns in shallow, rocky water near the shore (FAO, 2013). The shallow water is also where my father and I found fish at night. When the lake gets warmer and its level drops, these shallow edges change first. I wonder if climate change is hitting the same places that the native fish need most.

An illustration, not a measurement. Gold dots: eggs in the shallow, rocky spawning zone.

05

The Solutions

From a whole country down to one family.

Country

A fishing ban

In 2023 Kyrgyzstan banned commercial fishing in Issyk-Kul and Son-Kul. In July 2026 the ban was extended to 2029, because the fish stocks still had not recovered (24.kg, 2026).

Village

Raising native fish

In Lipenka, local people raise marinka and osman in tanks heated by solar power and release them into the lake. The state environment agency banned breeding non-native fish in the nurseries until they switch to native species (Blua, 2010).

Researchers

Sharing the lake

Alamanov and Mikkola (2011) recommend legal reform, protecting chosen native species, controlling the introduced fish, and co-management, where local fishing communities share responsibility for the lake with the state.

Country

Cleaning the water

The lake's sewage systems are 20 to 30 years old, and treatment plants handle waste from only a third of the three main lakeside cities. The Asian Development Bank and the government started a $37.5 million cleanup (Blua, 2010).

My grandfather

Never during spawning

The most important rule in my family is the season. A fish full of eggs could become hundreds or thousands of new fish. I feel bad if I catch one by accident. The fishing ban follows the same logic, just for a whole country.

My family

Our own ponds

We bought an apple garden in our village partly because it already had two fish ponds. We plan to raise our own trout. Every fish we raise at home is one less fish taken from the lake.

06

Thanks for the Trout

I have to be honest about something.

Trout is my favorite fish. Its meat is red, it tastes great, and you can take all the bones out.

What the trout gives

  • Food for my family, and a really good source of protein
  • Big, high-quality fish that are now common in the lake
  • Exactly what the Soviet scientists wanted

What the trout takes

  • The chebak, now endangered
  • The marinka and osman I have never seen in the wild
  • Spear fishing by the shore, the way my grandfather taught my father

The chebak is small, and it is hard to get the bones out before or while you eat it. When I think about whether my family would raise native marinka in our ponds, my honest answer is probably not, at least not now. Trout is more valuable, and people prefer it for food. (My cat loves both. She gets the small ones, so she is happy with any catch.)

So when I ask what the Soviet scientists' goal was, the uncomfortable answer is that they partly got what they wanted. If I could leave them a message, I would say thank you for the trout.

But it also makes me sad. I tell myself I am fine with it as long as the ecosystem stays balanced. The research says it is not balanced: the fishing ban was extended because the fish have not come back. My father calls the time when the lake was full of fish the best years of his life. Without the predators there were tons of fish, and the lake was cleaner. Part of that change is not about fish: about a million tourists visit every year, and old sewage systems let some waste flow straight into the lake (Blua, 2010).

I still don't understand why anyone would bring predators into an ecosystem that was so vulnerable to them. I don't have an answer, and I think that is the honest place to stand.
07

Concept Map

Everything on this page, in one picture. Tap a circle.

    08

    Connections to the Readings

    Suzanne Crawford O'Brien, Climate Anxiety and Spiritual Resilience

    Chapter 2

    Three kinds of coping

    Climate resilience comes in three forms: problem-focused coping (activism and lifestyle changes), emotion-focused coping (processing our feelings), and meaning-focused coping (exploring values and finding purpose).

    Problem: the fishing ban, the Lipenka hatcheries, my grandfather's rule, our ponds. Emotion: naming what I feel: sad for the chebak, grateful for the trout, frustrated that nobody stopped it. Meaning: a tradition passed from my grandfather to my father to me.

    Chapter 4

    Feeding resilience

    Food nourishes us, but it is also “an embodied remembering of the relationships that sustain us.”

    We eat the fish, feed our cat and dog, share with neighbors and friends, and cook it on the barbecue at potlucks. That is what fishing is for my family.

    In my first journal I wrote that I am Yrysray, “the people who live by the lake.” The chebak lived beside my people for generations. Losing it from the shore feels like losing a neighbor.

    Nobody knows if the chebak will come back, but the people in Lipenka release young fish anyway. That is the kind of hope I want to practice. Someday I will take my own kids into nature, teach them about the environment and the animals we have, and pass on my grandfather's rules, the way my father passed them to me.

    I hope there will still be fish by the shore for them to see in the light.
    09

    Sources

    APA, 7th edition.