with nutrients, and children were forbidden to bother the fish when they bathed in the waters. About 1960, Mozambique tilapias were introduced into the Buada Lagoon in the hopes of getting pisciculture going again and limiting the invasion of mosquitos. Unfortunately, the tilapias multiplied to such an extent that they presented some serious competition to the milkfish being raised in the lagoon, with no milkfish ever reaching a size suitable for harvest, that being some 20 cm long. This led many fish farmers to give up the trade, as the tilapias themselves were not very good to eat. To set this ecological blunder right, a number of attempts were made, some meeting with no success, and others even worsening an already bad situation. So the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), at Nauru's request, put in place a programme to reduce the tilapia population between 1979 and 1980. This programme entailed spreading rotenone on the lake's surface; this is a highly toxic molecule, particularly to fish, and dangerous to humans, but also biodegradable. The lake was thus temporarily poisoned. In 1991, the FAO's "South Pacific Aquaculture Development Project" (SPADP) showed that it was possible that the milkfish and the tilapia could coexist in fish farming. The FAO thus introduced in 1998 Nile tilapias into the Buada Lagoon, an experiment much like one carried out in Fiji that had shown them to have qualities that better appealed to local people's tastes. This meant that pisciculture might be revived in Nauru. At the same time, a Taiwanese project also sought to revive fish farming by using intensive methods of raising fish, but these were nevertheless both given up for want of funds. The failure of these attempts to get the fish farming industry running again then led to the establishment of a semi-intensive aquaculture programme, also Taiwanese, in 2001 which involved building concrete basins 20 m long, 10 m wide and 1.5 m deep. These were equipped with oxygenators, nets and specially adapted feeding. The idea was to allow fish farmers to raise milkfish using seawater, and without having to share the water with tilapias. Human presence Buada Lagoon, Nauru's only inhabited inland area, with some 660 inhabitants living around it, lies in the centre-west of Buada District. Girded by a road, the lakeshore is made up of private residential properties where fruit trees are grown, such as pandan,