The Exotic Imports
Of Lake Julian
Л
peculiar fish In Tilapia . . .
Hot water just makes him feel hapia.
By marguerite: se n i >i \\\
Lake Julian, south of Asheville in
the mountains of Western North
Carolina, is shaped like an irregular H.
with hands and feet and a belt of earth
across the middle. In several of its cor¬
ners. a visitor finds himself at a quiet
mountain lake, seemingly miles from
civilization, and can watch a shoreline
fringed with leaf and cone-bearing
trees, scan the sky for fish hawks, bit¬
terns or great blue and green herons,
and listen to squirrels chattering in the
distance. The mountains are hung w ith
blue haze.
On several other arms of the H.
however, the visitor finds himself on
one of the hardest-working industrial
lakes of Western North Carolina.
Here, on one end of the water (and the
reason, in fact, that the lake was
created) is the Sky land steam electric
generating plant, which has a capabil¬
ity of three billion kilowatt hours of
electricity a year. Its boiler stands six¬
teen stories and its stack rises 400 feet
in the air. and it docs with great effi¬
ciency what environmentalists fear —
it sucks 200.000 gallons of water from
the lake each minute and returns it
pure but heated. Sometimes in the
summer the surface of Lake Julian
rises as high as 103 degrees.
It was because of these raised temp¬
eratures that a decision was made, a
number of years ago. to stock, on an
experimental basis, a fish accustomed
to warmth. In 1964 more than 6.000
tilapia were released into the lake.
temperate mountains, where normal
winter temperatures often fall below
freezing.
The stocking of a foreign fish in
Western North Carolina was not done
without strong objections from some
ecologists, who pointed out that tilapia
released into Florida waters were
crowding out native fish.
This does not seem to have hap¬
pened in Lake Julian, however, where
the natives continue to dominate, both
in fishermen's catches and in biologi¬
cal studies.
About twenty species of tilapia have
been identified in Africa, but they are
extremely hard to tell apart. For a
number of years, it was thought that
the fingerlings released into Lake Ju¬
lian were Tilapia mossambica. and
they were so identified in a study made
of the lake under NSF auspices during
the summer of 1971 by students from
the University of North Carolina at
Asheville. In 1972. however, speci¬
mens from Lake Julian were sent to
Reeve M. Bailey. Curator of Fishes at
the Museum of Zoology, University of
Michigan, and he has identified those
he received as Tilapia aureau, also
known as the blue tilapia. which came
from Israel.
Unusual Breeding
Tilapia have several remarkable
characteristics. The females brood
their eggs and young in their mouths;
both sexes "guard" their eggs and
young in a nest, and the male develops
a highly colored breeding dress during
the season.
As spawning time nears, each male
establishes a territory where he digs,
with his mouth, one or more craters in
the mud. slightly longer than his own
body. Males congregate in the sprawn-
ing grounds and remain there for some
time, while females pick up their fer¬
tilized eggs in their mouths and move
off to the nests. In the open water areas
of a marsh at the eastern arm of Lake
Julian, two hundred tilapia nests were
counted during the students’ summer
study.
Male breeding colors vary in inten¬
sity and change rapidly, particularly
when they are superintending nests or
are in the presence of other fish. Their
normal green, fawn, or gray becomes
so green it is almost black. Intense light
blue spots appear on the fins, and the
orange irises glow. The female retains
THI
STATE, January 1977
Foreign Transplant
The tilapia. which is used exten¬
sively for stocking dam impoundments
in its native Africa, has been success¬
fully transplanted to many parts of the
world for fish culture as early as 1939
— to the Far East, the West Indies and
Hawaii. But it had not been done in the
The lilopio, occuttomed to worm iropicol woter», ho» opporently odopted well to Caroline Power ond Light
Company'» mountain lokc, i»
о
populor cotch for sport» fishermen (very light line, »moll hook, tmoll
corth-orm) and
о
good lood ti*h Among other remarkable choroctcrutie», lemolc tilopio brood both their
egg» ond their young in their mouth», (illuitrotion by Ann Pointer)
V n