Intense heat good for Dagupan’s ‘bangus’ industry

MERRYMAKING Dagupan City, one of the major commercial centers of Pangasinan province, opens the merrymaking for Bangus Festival through a street dancing parade. —WILLIE LOMIBAO

DAGUPAN CITY — Street performers launched this year’s Bangus Festival under biting summer heat, which people normally avoid but which has been beneficial to this city’s main product.

This city is proud of its homegrown “bangus” (milkfish), which thrive in very warm condition. Bangus do not reproduce when the weather cools down from October to February.

Dagupan experienced a heat index of 51.7°C on April 9. The festival opening parades on April 12 rolled out under 28.4-degree weather, according to the weather bureau, which measured the day’s relative humidity at 93.

The heat index during the festival opening was 35.7°C after a heavy downpour a day earlier.

Major streets in the business district here were closed to give way to a street dancing competition among students wearing bangus-themed costumes.

Began in 2002, the festival will be capped by a street party at De Venecia Highway here on April 30, where a stretch of grills will cook about 67,000 pieces of bangus.

Bangus production

Every week, the city produces 15 metric tons of bangus grown in 910 hectares of fish ponds. These are sold at the public market here, alongside 40 MT of bangus that are produced weekly in cages and pens in the neighboring towns of Anda, Bolinao and Sual.

Bangus breeders have taken advantage of the soaring temperature.

At the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources research center in Barangay Bonuan Binloc here, the bangus brood stock began to lay eggs this summer, according to Westly Rosario, the center’s chief.

The center maintains 60 bangus breeders kept in six tanks, each filled with 150 tons of water.

On Feb. 15, a rearing tank yielded 115,000 eggs, while another tank produced 175,000 eggs on March 5. As of April 10, breeders generated close to 6.5 million eggs.

Imported fry

In Barangay Ilo-ilo here, Retcem Fishery Farm has produced 50 million eggs from 150 bangus breeders, Rosario said.

The volume of egg production is not always equivalent to the number of fry or fingerlings produced because only 30 percent of eggs develop into fry, and only 75 percent of fry survive to become fingerlings.

The production output barely fulfills the country’s annual requirement for 3.2 billion bangus fingerlings. Half of that requirement, or 1.6 billion, is sourced from Indonesia. The rest of the fry are acquired from Sarangani province and the seasonal catch from the open seas. —Reports from Gabriel Cardinoza and Yolanda Sotelo