On the beach of Santa Marinella a porcupine fish appears, an alien and dangerous species

Maybe it came from the eastern Atlantic across the Strait of Gibraltar. Or maybe he was carelessly released by someone who was holding him in an expensive home aquarium. The fact is that that fish really shouldn’t have been where it was found, beached on the Lazio coast of Santa Marinella: a porcupine fish Chilomycterus reticulatusAlso known as speckled porcupine fish. An alien species, typical of tropical seas, certainly not of the Mediterranean. A potentially dangerous fish for humanswhose marketing for food purposes has already been prohibited since 1992, due to the possibility of accumulating tetrodotoxin, although to a lesser extent than in puffer fishes of the Tetraodontidae family.

It was reported to the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research a fisherman, also sensitized by the campaign «Watch out for those 4!» , created precisely to inform citizens about alien fish dangerous to human health. Porcupine fish was not among them, but evidently the fisherman was impressed unusual appearance of this specimen, about sixty centimeters long and covered by large spines, with teeth fused into plates and a characteristic spotted livery on the back and fins. So, he decided to contact the authorities, who confirmed that the fish was not from our seas.

His presence, if it were due to an accidental passage through the Strait of Gibraltar, would be yet another serious sign of how climate change puts the fauna that populates our seas at risk: the population of the speckled porcupine fish is in fact increasing sharply in the area of ​​North West Africa, and in particular in the seas of the Canary Islands, due to the ever warmer temperature of the waters.

From there, in fact, this strange fish could have arrived, previously reported only once in the Mediterranean, along the Sardinian coast of the island of Sant’Antioco in 2008. Or, it could have been released into the sea the owner of some tropical aquarium, perhaps tired of feeding his fish, or perhaps put in difficulty by a move in which taking his fish with him was too complicated. A practice not only risky for the animal, which suddenly finds itself passing from a regime of captivity to one of total freedom, with little chance of survival, but also a crime punishable with arrest and detention of up to three years and fines of between 10,000 and 150,000 eurosin the event that the released species belongs to those “invasive exotics”which are among the main causes of biodiversity loss, in Italy and in the world.

«The Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research and the Institute for Biological Resources and Marine Biotechnology renew the invitation not to release exotic species living in natural environmentsand to limit their chances of escaping from confined environments», emphasizing the importance of getting information in order to be able to report future sightings, learning «to learn about the new exotic species that inhabit our seasstarting from the potentially dangerous ones that are illustrated by the campaign “Beware of those 4″».