Hello, this isWild Suzhou,

Today, we will betalking about Na Doi, a small fishing village in Thailand that was able to savethe fish populations that lived in their local river.

Na Doi is a smallvillage with around 75 households that is in northwest Thailand. In 1998, theynoticed the amount of fish in their rivers was declining, as fishermen weren’tcatching as family fish. They also noticed that the fish they caught weresmaller than they used to be. To fix the problem, the villagers decided to keepan area of the river off limits from fishing, hoping that the fish populationwould be able to grow.

Their projectworked, and now the section of the river is filled with larger fish and morefish. Even areas outside of the protected area have more fish nowadays,according to villagers. Na Doi is not the only village to have tried this.Dozens of other villages have decided to try the same thing, with similarresults. These results show that this tactic could be useful in larger scaleconservation of river animals, which are at higher risk than both land andocean animals.

In 2012, AaronKoning visited the river valley that the Na Doi lived in to see how successfulit really was. He spent several years visiting other villages in the area, andfound that the bigger and older reserves were more successful since they had givenmore time and space for populations to recover. However, even small reservesthat were the size of a bathtub were able to help struggling fish populations.

For Wild Suzhou,I’m Ciana, thanks for listening and see you next time.