A committee tasked with assessing the issue of restoring the Ishkhan fish species in Lake Sevan, told a government cabinet session today that two of the four sub-species were forever extinct.

Lake Sevan was once prized for its endemic (Salmo ischchan), a salmonid fish related to the brown trout.

The two extinct strains are the winter bakhtak (Salmo ischchan ischchan) and the bojak (Salmo ischchan danilewskii).

The other two strains -the summer bakhtak and gegharkuni - are mainly propagated by hatcheries and the committee confesses there is no natural reproduction.

It appears that the committee has also given up on restocking programs, admitting that they have been ineffective over the years.

Instead, the committee backs a government program that would use Sevan for fish farming for commercial purposes.

The program envisages producing 50,000 tons of fish in the next ten years for export valued at 175 billion AMD.

According to the program, 1.5% of these revenues would be plowed back into restocking projects.