According to the initial investigation on July 5, the Department of Animal Health in the district said that shellfish in some areas in Can Gio district died might be due to water pollution.

 The Department’s statistics showed that total area for breeding the animal is around 1,000 hectares and it has seen shellfish died in seven hectares, mostly in Rach Lo section in Can Thanh Town.

Officials from the Department took samples of dead shellfish for testing to verify the cause of death. Dead shellfish are most baby shellfish raised in areas near the shore while bigger shellfish raised in farms far away the shore are still alive.

Accordingly, experts suspected that water pollution caused the massive deaths because the areas have many farms to breed fishes.

 But they did not exclude the deaths are caused by parasite Perkinsus sp which can live in salty level over 28‰ and high temperature while recently the weather is cool in Can Gio and salty level reduced to 24‰.

 Can Gio district sees shellfish death every year, especially in 2009-2010, the animal died massively. At the time the city authorities had to asked for help from the Research Institute for Aquaculture No.2 to study the cause. And then the city administrator issued guidelines on raising the animal to avoid shellfish death and to achieve high output. 

Source: SGGP