Deputy Ministers of Economy Tigran Gabrielyan and Arman Khojoyan today visited a fish farm breeding the nearly extinct wild summer bakhtat and gegharkuni subspecies of the famed Lake Sevan trout (Salmo ischchan).

The trout are propagated for commercial export in net pens placed in Lake Sevan.

The fish are then sorted for size via special equipment located on the lake shore and transferred to appropriate pens.

Most of the fish are exported to Russia and the U.S.

Fishing for the trout, native to Sevan, was banned decades ago.

In 2014, an Armenian government committee tasked with assessing the issue of restoring the ishkhan fish species in Lake Sevan,reported 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.