Китай выпустил МИЛЛИАРДЫ рыб в мертвую реку — то, что произошло дальше, потрясло ученых

In 2021, China launched the most ambitious river restoration project ever attempted on Earth: a total 10-year commercial fishing ban on the Yangtze River, covering more than 3,700 kilometers of waterway and pulling over 111,000 fishing boats out of the water. Over 230,000 fishing families had to find entirely new livelihoods, supported by government payments, retraining programs, and a groundbreaking initiative that hired former fishermen as official river watchers — the same people who once caught fish now protecting them. Alongside the ban, China released 1.3 billion fish back into the Yangtze, including nearly 1 million Chinese sturgeons, an ancient species that has survived on Earth for over 100 million years but was nearly wiped out in just five decades of industrial fishing, pollution, and dam construction. The results stunned scientists across three continents. Within four years, the total weight of living fish in the Yangtze more than doubled, native fish species rebounded from 308 to 351, and the Yangtze finless porpoise — one of the only freshwater porpoises in the world, with fewer than 400 left in 2017 — surged past 600 individuals. Researchers from France, the United States, and Australia are now using the Yangtze data as a template for restoring collapsing rivers worldwide, including the Mississippi, the Mekong, and the Amazon. The project cost over 2.7 billion dollars and involved dozens of universities, thousands of scientists, and millions of citizens, proving that large-scale ecological recovery is not just possible — it can happen faster than any model predicted.