After humans, cormorants are perhaps the largest consumers of fish from Baltic aquaculture sites. These shore birds, of medium size but maximum appetite, nest in colonies along the coast where their favorite food—fish, wild or farmed—is to be found. They are immensely costly to aquaculture farms along the Baltic coast. In Lithuania, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long sought a balance between populations of cormorants and “populations” of fish farms. For many years the EPA, with EU money, helped farmers with using “nonlethal” means to control cormorants, such as coating their eggs with oil to prevent them from hatching, and financially compensating farmers for cormorant-caused losses. In recent years the money spent on this support has risen to a third of the agency’s entire budget for aquaculture and nature management efforts.
However, the problem has continued. Recognizing cormorants are not an endangered species, the EPA recently announced a new system of individual quotas (farm-specific) for cormorants that are “caught or destroyed” by farmers. The quotas are determined by the EPA using data that farms shall report on the number of problematic birds and the financial losses they cause. Farms can then take the necessary action to reduce the problem, during a period each year set by the agency in accordance with other environmental factors that fall under its managerial purview. “We have agreed that it would make sense to take the next step and go towards setting individual quotas, by determining the number of birds that can be taken for each farm,” said an official. The implementation of the new system is being done gradually; the goal is to have the system fully implemented by 2025, and this year 15 farms will be fully in the system, with only a few more to go.