'All gone' Fears for wildlife at Lough Neagh

Former eel fisher Declan Coney knew there was something wrong when the famed swarms of Lough Neagh flies failed to materialise.

- Tommy Greene

In past years, they would appear around the lake in Northern Ireland in thick plumes and "wisps" sometimes prompting mistaken alarm of a fire incident, local people say. Clothes left on a washing line "would be covered in them", Coney says. So would any windscreen on a car travelling around the lough's 90-mile shoreline.

Last spring, the flies never arrived and alarm is growing.

"People have really been scared," Coney says, by the rate of accelerated change to the lough's ecology that their absence signals.

"It's just happened: like the flip of a switch, it's gone." "Lough Neagh fly" can refer to various non-biting midges, but these crucial insects support fish and wildfowl that are endemic to the lough system, as well as frogs and predatory insects. The loss of these keystone species, alongside sharp reductions of others and a long-term deterioration in water quality, indicates deep trouble across the lough's entire system.

It also raises the prospect that this shallow body of water and its surrounding wetlands may have shifted beyond a state of decline into cascading ecosystem collapse.

Lough Neagh supplies more than 40% of Northern Ireland's drinking water, and hosts the largest wild eel fishery in Europe.

It is considered a cultural and archaeological jewel that reaches far back into the very beginning of shared memory on the island.

Last summer, a vast "bloom" of blue-green algae - a thick, photosynthesising blanket that deprives the lough of oxygen, choking aquatic life - brought the biodiversity crisis into sharp focus.

It prompted considerable public outcry and is expected to return in a more severe form this summer.

The toxic algal growth has since disappeared from the surface of the lough, but remains visibly suspended just underneath.