Two Buddhists fined £15,000 for releasing crustaceans into sea | UK news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/23/two-buddhists-fined-15000-releasing-non-native-crustaceans-sea-brighton
Two Buddhists who released £5,000 worth of crustaceans into the Channel as part of a religious ceremony have been fined almost £15,000 for causing “untold damage” to the environment.
Zhixiong Li and Ni Li helped throw live crabs and lobsters into the sea off Brighton as part of a “life release” ceremony in 2015, a court has heard.
The pair were part of a group of almost 1,000 people celebrating the visit of the Taiwanese Buddhist master Hai Tao.
Their ritual was performed in the belief that returning animals to the wild is good karma. But because the crustaceans were not native species, they threatened other marine life and government agencies had to spend thousands of pounds in an attempt to recapture the shellfish, offering fishermen a bounty to reel them in.
[…]
Miller said Zhixiong Li had bought the local shellfish and hired the boat. Further investigations found that 361 American lobsters and 350 Dungeness (US) crabs had been bought from a wholesale fish supplier, SeeWoo, in Greenwich, south-east London, by Ni Li.
[…]
Only 323 crustaceans have been recovered and the most recent American lobsters found had been carrying “viable eggs”, showing they had been breeding.