Lake Sevan · Law and biosecurity

Lake Sevan: wildlife protection and collecting rules

Two constraints sit in front of every other decision about Lake Sevan, and both of them are about what leaves the shore. What the protected status actually forbids, and the biosecurity question, which runs from the lake to the tank and from the tank back to the lake, and which this lake has already lost twice.

Lake Sevan’s eastern shoreline
The eastern shore of Lake Sevan.Камалян001 · CC0 · Resized; uncropped.

C. The take-home tank

Before you pick anything up: the whole lake is a national park and a Ramsar site.

This section comes first because it changes what the rest of the page can honestly recommend. All of Lake Sevan sits inside Sevan National Park, created in 1978, which contains 124,759 hectares of water and wetland1. Armenia's protected areas total about 387,054 hectares, 13.1 percent of the country1. Lake Sevan is also Ramsar site 620, designated in 1993, at 490,231 hectares2. Nothing you do on that shore is happening on ordinary ground.

Animals: settled, and the answer is no

Do not take a fish. Do not take a crayfish. Not one, not for the tank.

The Law on Fauna makes wildlife state property, requires the Ministry's agreement to keep a wild animal in confinement, and lists the only permitted uses of wildlife: agricultural, industrial, social and environmental, research and educational, and health and reproduction. A home aquarium is not on that list3. Separately, Code of Administrative Offences Article 88.1, added in 2022, makes keeping a wild animal in captive or semi-captive conditions without the appropriate permission an offence carrying 150,000 to 200,000 AMD for a citizen4.

And the gear is illegal before the species question even arises. Amateur fishing in 2026 is rods only, two rods per angler and two hooks per rod, for seventeen named taxa, none of which is an aquarium fish5, and the prohibited-methods rule bans nets, snares, loops and traps outright, with fishing included in the legal definition of hunting6. There is no lawful way to catch a small fish with a dip net in Armenia.

And it compounds

What one fish in a jar actually costs.

Inside a protected natural area the arithmetic stacks. Compensation for illegally taken bioresources is multiplied by five inside a specially protected natural area, and all of Lake Sevan is one7. Criminal Code Article 385(2) raises illegal catching of aquatic animals where it is done inside a specially protected natural area or involves a Red Book species, to a fine of 20 to 40 times monthly income or one to four years' imprisonment8. One illegally caught summer bakhtak taken in Lake Sevan is 50,000 AMD compensation times five, so 250,000 AMD before any fine at all79.

Enforcement is not theoretical. In the closed period of 9 to 26 December 2024 the environmental inspectorate seized 32 vessels and 695 kg of fish, removed 879 nets and 119 crayfish traps from the lake, assessed damage at 3,473,830 AMD and opened three administrative and seven criminal cases10.

Plants, stone, sand and water: not settled

We read the law and it does not answer the question you are asking.

Plants and minerals are not animals in Armenian law and are not covered by the Law on Fauna. What governs them here is the protected-areas statute. The Law on Specially Protected Natural Areas, restated by HO-299-N of 18 June 2026 and in force from 24 July 2026, sets out for a national park's recreational zone a closed list of prohibitions and a closed list of permitted activities11. Four things in it bear directly on collecting.

Prohibited. "Use of water resources", subject to named exceptions for drinking supply, irrigation and the park's own purposes11.
Prohibited. Disturbing the growing and living conditions of plant and animal species11.
Prohibited. Use of objects of the plant and animal world and their products for commercial purposes11.
Permitted, and this list is closed. Visitor recreation, scientific study and monitoring, ecotourism, amateur fishing under the Law on Fauna, recreational land use, sanitary felling, ecosystem restoration, trail infrastructure, educational practice, and parking in designated places11.

So what does that mean for a handful of hornwort and a jar of sand? Honestly: we cannot tell you, and we are not going to pretend. The statute prohibits commercial use of plants and prohibits disturbing habitat, and its permitted list does not mention personal collecting of anything. It also does not obviously contemplate a visitor putting three stems and a liter of water in a bag. Whether that is "use of water resources", whether it "disturbs growing conditions", and which zone of the park the particular beach you are standing on falls into, are all questions the text does not resolve and that we could not resolve from any published zoning map.

The correct move is to ask, and there is a body to ask. The park is administered under the Ministry of Environment at environment.gov.am. Note that sevanpark.am is now a parked domain for sale rather than an official site, and mnp.am no longer resolves1, so do not take an answer from either. A dive operator who has worked the lake since 2018 and collaborates with archaeologists12 is also a reasonable person to ask what the wardens actually enforce, which is a different question from what the statute says and worth knowing too.

One route is unambiguously open and almost nobody uses it. Scientific and educational use of fauna is permitted and is free of charge under Government Decision N 600-N of 15 May 2025, and the Red Book route under Minister of Environment Order N 259-N of 3 July 2024 is open to research institutions, universities, organizations whose statutes cover fauna study, and qualified natural persons13. That last category is a door. If an Armenian aquarist wanted to work with native species properly, rather than furtively, it is the one to walk through.

The line this page will not cross. Never take an ishkhan, a koghak or a beghlu, alive or dead, in any quantity, for any reason. Two of the four named forms of the Sevan trout are already gone9. Nothing in a home aquarium is worth being part of the third.

C. The take-home tank

Biosecurity runs both ways, and this lake has already lost that argument twice.

Sevan's history is a list of things that arrived and stayed: whitefish deliberately in the 1920s, Prussian carp accidentally by the early 1980s, narrow-clawed crayfish accidentally in the 1980s, rainbow trout as farm escapees, and topmouth gudgeon around 201014. Two of the four species a 2022 screening rated highest-risk for the whole South Caucasus are already in the basin15. A page that sends people to a national park with a collecting bag has to be serious about this, so here it is in two directions.

Out of the lake, into your flat

A stem of hornwort carries snails, snail eggs, hydra, planaria, leeches, ostracods, Daphnia resting eggs, filamentous algae and whatever is on them. A liter of lake water carries the plankton and the bacteria. None of that is exotic; most of it is harmless in a tank and some of it is useful. But you are also carrying disease. Burn-spot disease is currently one of the two forces that crashed the Sevan crayfish population16, and the Soviet-era literature includes dedicated studies of the parasite fauna of the Sevan whitefish17.

The bloom risk, specifically

Do not collect during or just after a cyanobacterial bloom. The July 2019 bloom produced microcystin and anatoxin-a at 0.147 micrograms per liter and drove littoral dissolved oxygen to 0.4 mg per liter18. That water does not belong in a bucket in your car, let alone in a tank in a room you sleep in. If the shore smells and the water is opaque green, take stones and go home.

Out of your flat, into the lake: never

Not a fish, not a snail, not a plant fragment, not a liter of tank water, not a rinsed filter sponge. The Law on Fauna Article 19(a) prohibits transfer of animals into a different habitat and acclimatisation, and Code of Administrative Offences Article 90 makes unauthorised resettlement, acclimatisation and hybridisation an offence at 50,000 to 80,000 AMD for a citizen34. Inside a national park's recreational zone the protected-areas law separately prohibits the introduction and acclimatisation of invasive alien plant and animal species and of genetically modified organisms11.

Which way your drain flows

This is worth knowing and almost nobody does. Sevan has one outlet, the Hrazdan, which runs down to Yerevan and on to the Araks. So water leaving a Yerevan flat flows away from Sevan; the receiving water at risk is the Ararat plain and the Araks, not the lake. A tank in Gavar, Martuni, Vardenis or Sevan town is the opposite case: everything you pour away is inside the lake's own catchment. If you live in the basin, treat your tank as if it were connected to the lake, because it is.

The practical routine, which is short. Rinse collected plants in tap water and pick them over by eye before they go anywhere near a display tank. Give them four weeks in a bucket on a windowsill with nothing valuable in it, and look at what hatches. Do not move water between the lake bucket and the tank once the tank is running. Dry and disinfect nets, buckets, boots and dive gear before they touch another water body, including another lake in Armenia. And if the collection does not work out, the material goes in a bin bag and then in the bin, not back in the car and back to the shore. Returning "just the plants I took" is the single most tempting and most damaging thing on this list, because by then they have been in contact with a tank. See the livestock page for the general case and the pond jar for what a deliberately unquarantined bucket actually grows.

  1. Armenia's Fifth National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Protected areas totalling about 387,054 ha, 13.1 percent of the country, across 3 state reserves, 4 national parks, 27 sanctuaries and 232 natural monuments; Sevan National Park with 124,759 ha of water and wetland. The park's founding year is given as 1978 in the Armenian literature; the domain sevanpark.am is now parked for sale and mnp.am no longer resolves, so the administering ministry is environment.gov.am. cbd.int PDF open access
  2. Ramsar Sites Information Service, annotated summary for Armenia. Three wetlands in force since 6 November 1993 totalling 493,511 ha: Lake Sevan, site 620, at 490,231 ha; Lake Arpi, site 621; and Khor Virap Marsh, site 1989. rsis.ramsar.org PDF
  3. RA Law on Fauna (Կենդանական աշխարհի մասին), HO-52, adopted 3 April 2000, rewritten in 2022, in force since 14 April 2023. Article 21 on keeping wild animals in confinement, Article 23 on the closed list of permitted uses, Article 19(a) on transfer into a different habitat and acclimatisation, Article 27 on Red Book species. arlis.am open access, Armenian
  4. RA Code of Administrative Offences, Article 88.1, added 23 March 2022 by HO-75-N. Keeping wild animals, including Red Book animals, in captive or semi-captive conditions without the appropriate permission: citizens 150,000 to 200,000 AMD, legal persons 170,000 to 250,000, a further 100,000 for a repeat within a year. Articles 88, 89, 90 and 91 in the same code cover fishing rule breaches, illegal catching, unauthorised resettlement and destruction of Red Book animals. arlis.am open access, Armenian
  5. Minister of Environment Order N 13-N of 21 January 2026, in force 24 January 2026. The 2026 amateur fishing species list, quotas, seasons, minimum sizes and gear: seventeen taxa, rods only, at most two rods per angler with two hooks each, and a general prohibition on any species not in the annex. arlis.am open access, Armenian
  6. RA Law on Hunting and Hunting Economy, HO-176-N. Article 21.1 bans nets, snares, loops, traps and hooks, explosives, chemicals, gases and electric current, and any other method of mass destruction of wild animals. Article 1 defines hunting to include fishing. arlis.am open access, Armenian
  7. RA Law on compensation tariffs for damage caused to fauna and flora, HO-88-N. Per-specimen tariffs for Red Book animals, including 50,000 AMD for the summer bakhtak and the gegharkuni, 10,000 for the Sevan khramulya and 25,000 for the Sevan barbel; per-kilogram tariffs of 1,000 AMD for other fish and for crayfish; and the Article 6 multipliers, including times three for destroying habitat or spawning sites and times five for illegal use of bioresources inside a specially protected natural area. arlis.am open access, Armenian
  8. RA Criminal Code, HO-199-N, in force from 1 July 2022. Article 385 on illegal catching of aquatic animals; paragraph 2 raises the penalty where the offence is committed by a group, in respect of a Red Book species, where it eliminates a population, or inside a specially protected natural area: a fine of 20 to 40 times monthly income, or imprisonment of one to four years. arlis.am open access, Armenian
  9. Red Book of Animals of the Republic of Armenia (2010). Annex to Government Decision N 71-N of 29 January 2010. The legal statuses of the Sevan trout and its four named forms, the Sevan khramulya and the Sevan barbel, the last-record dates, the ban dates, and the species names used in Armenian law. The ARLIS amendment history is empty: the Red Book has never been amended. arlis.am, text at environment.gov.am open access, Armenian
  10. Hetq, 27 December 2024. Report of the Environmental and Subsoil Inspection Body's operation in the closed period of 9 to 26 December 2024 on Lake Sevan: 32 vessels and 695 kg of fish seized, 879 nets and 119 crayfish traps removed, damage assessed at 3,473,830 AMD, three administrative and seven criminal cases opened. hetq.am open access, Armenian
  11. RA Law on Specially Protected Natural Areas (Բնության հատուկ պահպանվող տարածքների մասին), adopted 27 November 2006, completely restated by HO-299-N of 18 June 2026, in force 24 July 2026. The article on the protection regime of a national park: the reserve zone takes the reserve regime, the sanctuary zone takes the sanctuary regime, and for the recreational zone the law gives a closed prohibition list including use of water resources, disturbance of the growing and living conditions of plant and animal species, introduction and acclimatisation of invasive alien species, mineral exploitation and commercial use of objects of the plant and animal world, and a closed permitted list which does not include personal collecting. Article numbers have moved twice in this statute, so always cite the version. Read by us in the Armenian original on 9 September 2026. arlis.am open access, Armenian
  12. ArmDiving, Archaeological Underwater Excavations. The club's own statement that it dives at locations named by archaeologists and records video for specialists. Archived 1 October 2022. Internet Archive copy
  13. Government Decision N 600-N of 15 May 2025 on scientific and educational use of fauna, free of charge (arlis.am), and Minister of Environment Order N 259-N of 3 July 2024 on the Red Book route, open to research institutions, universities, organisations whose statutes cover fauna study, and qualified natural persons (arlis.am). open access, Armenian
  14. Gabrielyan, B., Khosrovyan, A. and Schultze, M. (2022). A review of the anthropogenic stress on Lake Sevan and the current state of the ecosystem. Journal of Limnology 81(s1): 2061. Open access. The level, volume, area, depth, temperature and transparency series used throughout this page. DOI 10.4081/jlimnol.2022.2061 open access
  15. Mumladze, L., Kuljanishvili, T., Japoshvili, B., Epitashvili, G., Kalous, L., Vilizzi, L. and Piria, M. (2022). Risk screening of 32 non-native and horizon freshwater fish species for the South Caucasus under current and projected climate. NeoBiota 76: 109 to 133. Open access. Very high risk species rise from 4 to 12 under projected climate; gibel carp and topmouth gudgeon top both lists. DOI 10.3897/neobiota.76.82776 open access
  16. Ghukasyan, G., Asatryan, A., Melkonyan, H., Badalyan, A., Shahnazaryan, G. and Gabrielyan, B. (2023). A study of the narrow-clawed crayfish collapse in Lake Sevan, with oxidative stress biomarkers in healthy and burn-spot-infected animals. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 195: 1278. DOI 10.1007/s10661-023-11921-3 paywalled, abstract open, PMID 37801148
  17. The parasite fauna of the Sevan whitefish. Two dedicated studies in the Armenian literature: Reports of the NAS RA 23: 45 to 48 (1956), PDF, and Biological Journal of Armenia 25: 67 to 71 (1972), PDF. Both in Russian, both free. Found through the Sevan literature list described in source 37. open access, Russian
  18. Hambaryan, L. and others (2020). The July 2019 cyanobacterial bloom in Lake Sevan: the first record of cyanotoxins in the lake, with dissolved oxygen at 0.4 and 0.5 mg/L in the littoral, pH at 6.8 and anatoxin-a at 0.147 micrograms per litre. Recorded in our survey of the Sevan literature; the figures are the authors', not ours. See the Sevan science database for the record and the PDF link.

Continue

Where to go next.

Lake Sevan

The lake itself, what it is like under the surface, and what it has stopped being.

Building a Sevan biotope

What you can build without taking anything off the shore.

The Armenian scene

The rest of Armenian law on keeping a wild animal, and the penalties attached to it.

A jar from a pond

Collecting for a jar, where the same biosecurity question applies at two litres.