A handful of small, unknown fish in Lao Wei's boat account for a whole day's fishing on the Shaying River.
Wei, 60, from Jieshou City of east China's Anhui Province, used to be an osprey trainer, but has not worked in the profession for more than 10 years because heavy pollution has wiped out the river's fish population.
Nobody trains ospreys on the Shaying, a tributary of the Huaihe River, a career from which Wei and his ancestors made a living.
"We have no fish. Imagine, we used to have everything here, crabs, turtles and big fish," he said.
In the province's Fengyang County, 200 kilometers downstream from Wei's village, fisherman Yu Jiayou tells a similar story.
"Fishing used to support over 3,000 households whereas now there only a few dozen," Yu said.
The Huaihe, China's third largest river, which runs through the Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, used to supply one-sixth of the country's water.
But a decade of industrial pollution has transformed it into a wasteland, and the situation has got worse this year, according to statistics from water quality monitoring departments.
The Huaihe Water, Environment and Resources Protection Administration reported in June little progress had been made in limiting pollution even though more than 60 billion yuan (US$7.2 billion) has been invested on the problem.
An investigation by the administration showed 31.5 percent of industries along the river, which include paper-making factories, chemical plants, food and beverage companies and textiles producers, discharge pollutants far exceeding legal limits.
"The water is so polluted it's not even suitable for industrial or agricultural use, let alone supporting fish populations," said Wang Hui, a researcher of the Water Environmental Protection Center in Fuyang, a city along the Shaying River in Anhui.
China rates water quality from grade one to five, with five considered too toxic to even touch.
The water in the lower reaches of the Huaihe is rated five, making it unfit even for irrigation.
But fish are not the only victims of the pollution.
An investigation by the Ecological Science Research Center on Huaihe River Valley found nearly 50,000 people have cancer in at least 20 villages along the Shaying River.
At Huangmengying, a village of Shenqiu County, 114 villagers have died of cancer in the past 14 years, eight in the last two months.
More deaths will follow because cancer diagnoses are skyrocketing.
Kong Heqin, a 30-year-old mother of two, has undergone three operations for rectal cancer.
"At first I had diarrhea, then I began to vomit whenever I drank the water," Kong said.
"If not for my two children, I would given up on life."
The sick, poverty-stricken mother said she had enjoyed good health in her childhood and had never gone to the doctor.
Huangmengying is not the only area on the Huaihe labelled a "cancer village."
Villagers directly attribute the situation to water pollution, blaming their poverty and chronic medical problems, which include birth defects, dementia and cancer, on the fertilizer-smelling river.
In another village, Meng Qingkun was told by his doctors in 2002 he had spondylitis, a disease mainly caused by overexposure to dangerous heavy metals such as mercury.
Meng was advised to move from his village, but refused.
"I don't have enough strength to work anymore and all the money I saved has been spent on purified water. Where else could I go?" Meng, 26, said.
"Now I just muddle along with no thought about tomorrow."
(Xinhua)