Greece Installs First Floating Barrier Against Toxic Pufferfish
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- Chalkida vice-mayor Antonis Spanos oversaw the installation of Greece's first floating barrier across a bay in the northern Gulf of Euboea, with 2.5 km of net already anchored and an estimated 7 km more due in coming weeks from Athens.
- The silver-cheeked toadfish (Lagocephalus sceleratus) — an Indo-Pacific species entering the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal as warming waters open the route — carries the lethal neurotoxin tetrodotoxin with no known antidote, prompting an unprecedented Greek Red Cross public health warning about severe bites.
- Greece's agriculture ministry, led by Margaritis Schinas, unveiled a catch program paying €5.33 (£4.57) per kilogram of pufferfish surrendered to authorities, alongside EU-funded fuel subsidies for affected fishers, initially in Crete and the southern Aegean; caught fish are to be frozen and incinerated.
- Cyprus's 2024 eradication scheme has already resulted in more than 103 tonnes of the toxic fish being removed from coastal waters under a government-backed financial-incentive program, the article reports.
- University of the Aegean marine scientist Ioannis Batjakas called the public alarm "much ado about nothing," saying he had only seen one pufferfish in 15 years of diving and that attacks on humans are very rare and only occur when the fish are provoked.
- The Initiative to Save Puffer Fish, which surfaced last week, is pushing back against the eradication campaign on ethical grounds — a conservation-versus-safety tension the article surfaces but the dominant "protect the swimmers" framing tends to gloss over.
- Amateur fisher Nikos Ayiaskoufitis dismissed the response as "too late," arguing the €5.33/kg bounty is insufficient to draw professional fishers into targeting the species.
Why it matters: Two Mediterranean states are now paying cash and stringing nets to counter an invasion directly tied to warming seas — Cyprus has already pulled 103 tonnes and Greece is paying €5.33/kg — yet a marine scientist quoted in the article calls the threat overstated and a local fisher says the bounty is too low to mobilize professionals, so the most visible actions may be running well ahead of measurable risk.
