Less than four decades after some British colonel covertly brought the first specimen of Lates niloticus to Lake Victoria in an intend to raise fishing revenues and also promote sport fishing and tourism in the area, more than half of the species previously inhabiting the lake have disappeared from its waters, mainly due to the large perch's voracious appetite. Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world and most vital supporter of Africa's inland fishery, was also deemed one of the richest and most inspiring ecosystems on the planet. The formerly endemic species were mainly haplochromine chichlids, small, extremely adaptable fish that largely feed on detritus, plankton and algae and so significantly contributed to keeping the lake water's oxygen level balanced. Since the chichlids are all but gone, bacteria and algae proliferate and further pollute the area. Also, the settling of fishing-related industries and the rapidly growing number of people moving to the region have irreversibly altered the local environment and unquestionably brought serious contamination to the lake: not only sewage and industrial waste products but also deforestation (unlike the locally preferred chichlids, Nile perch, due to its higher fat content, can't be sun-dried but must be smoked, a circumstance that dramatically increased the demand for firewood) and poor sanitation pose grave problems to the shore regions in the three lake-adjacent nations Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Additionally, yet another invasive species, Eichhornia, the water hyacinth, is challenging the ecosystem's already disturbed balance: one of the fastest growing plants on the planet, the water hyacinth is an extremely annoying obstacle and adversary particularly to small fisheries; it is further starving the lake of oxygen and serves as breeding ground for mosquitos and other parasites that act as disease vectors. 

The various problems have already been addressed by local authorities. It has become quite clear that the issues of vanishing biodiversity, ecological contamination, illegal fishing and corruption that all came in package with the fish's economic success story must be tackled immediately, especially since another unpredicted but, of course, not really surprising change in numbers has shaken the fishing industry and stirred the worries of more than a million people working in jobs related to it: the numbers of Nile perch, the seemingly invincible invader of Lake Victoria that has led to the collapse of the greater part of Lake Victoria's previously thriving aquatic wildlife, are dropping radically. With an extreme impact: As Nile perch volumes fell from 1.12 million tons in 2001 to 650 000 tons between August 2005 and Feb 2007  and then experienced a sudden, sharp drop to only 300 000 tons within the following 18 months, a good number of fish-processing factories were shut down, leaving the remaining ones forced to cut their operation rates to less than half their capacity. If no serious achievements concerning sustainability and the restoration of the severely damaged lake system are made any time soon, the very fish that has caused so much dispute and controversy in debates between economists and environmentalists over the past decades, ironically by now itself a case of an endangered species, will very likely be gone entirely from Lake Victoria in the near future and with it the livelihood of hundreds of thousands in three different nations whose export economies do, more or less, depend on the fish's prospering.