RE: NANFA-- Re:pulling our heads out of the sand & miniature

Crail, Todd (tcrail_at_northshores.com)
Fri, 14 Jun 2002 20:59:02 -0400

Oh Moon, don't believe the hype. It is true, a decent amount of SPS and
octocoral are being propogated stateside... My two reef systems would be
an example of that, and I take pride that I've had the opportunity to
contribute my experiences in the hobby. However, having been somewhat
on "the inside" for the last 3 years, I've seen absolutely nothing to
prove that anything is being done with consideration to sustainable
harvest (let alone, that captive prop even *compares* to the volume of
wild take). Everyone is *still* shipping out as much as CITES will
allow them, and Fiji and the United States has even ignored CITES call
to cease shipment from Fiji because they can't even get their act
together enough to fill out their CITES paperwork. How can we even
expect that they care enough to practice sustainable practices?
Seriously? Europe *didn't* belive them. They stopped shipping from
Fiji.

Sure MAC, IMA, and AMDA have made some excellent political work in the
last two years and I appreciate their work greatly. It is definately an
uphill battle for them, and as an aquaintance of a few of the board
members, I've heard their frustrations over and over (sometimes I've
been their frustration too :).

However, I've also been in the Los Angeles wholesalers on arrivals day.
I saw *one* 50 breeder with captive raised animals in the 3 places we
stopped and we're not talking small operations here. These are the big
boys and I can only venture to guess how many boxes of animals they
brought in on just that day. I counted 43 boxes at Mega Pacific and
that was the smallest operation (figure 25 colonies per box).

On the live rock front... Sure Tampa Bay and Gulf View are making a
healthy business out of aquaculture and they should be commended.
However, one of the middle players in the rock business I know is
bringing in a can every 3 weeks during the busy season, sometimes every
two weeks from Fiji. That's 44 88lb boxes of rock per can (almost 2
tons). That's just *1* of the people. There are some operations that
bring in 2 per week! There's no way that you can tell me that the
Florida operations are shipping *just* what my friend is shipping.
There's just no way.

With certainty, pollution, intolerable fishing practices, and a steady
increase in average surface temperature are what have the reefs on their
knees. But I still have yet to see any example that the industry has
done anything to slow it's wild take. In fact, one of the larger
wholesalers that I visited in LA just moved to a new facility that
tripled their holding capacity. Check this out:
http://www.seadwelling.com/construction.htm Remember, it's their
business to move as much inventory in and out as fast as possible. If
they sit on it, it could die on them (and when I was there, they
literally had the animals sitting on each other... the 50 breeder was
the most sparsely populated). Looks like wild take is alive and well to
me.

The only agenda in my experience is to make some money. There's nothing
wrong with that either. However, I refuse to take lightly that this
industry is all about being tidy at making money until I see it acting
that way. My word for it is still.... "exploitation". And I don't feel
that I've come to that conclusion based on reading a couple articles
here and there or listened to what someone said on the Internet....

Now if you'd like to continue this discussion, I'm more than privvy to
have it, although I don't want to bother a native fish list since I'm
here to get away from that whole scene. We can explore comments and
questions, why I had an LFS for a year and why I shut it down and ate
the debt, why I still have reef aquariums and what will soon happen to
them, I can produce statistics and whatnot... Perhaps offline from the
list if no one else is interested in hearing it. But it *is* Friday
night and I've had enough of this week. It's time to go have some fun
and quit thinking about doom and gloom :)

Todd
-----Original Message-----
From: Moontanman_at_aol.com
Sent: Fri 6/14/2002 6:59 PM
To: nanfa_at_aquaria.net
Cc:
Subject: Re: NANFA-- Re:pulling our heads out of the sand &
miniature sturgeon


In a message dated 6/14/02 5:17:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
tcrail_at_northshores.com writes:

<< but will knock each other down to get
that extra special super-purple live Acropora to place in their
75
gallon curio cabinet (I'll expand on this if you desire)... >>

Please do, considering most of the small polyp stony coral is
captive bred.
Very little acropora is wild caught and what is wild caught is
inferior in
quality to captive propagated coral. More and more coral is
being captive
propagated every day, many "reefers" will only keep captive
propagated coral
or live rock. On top of that the actual amount of live coral
collected world
wide is insignificant when compared to the coral that harvested
to make
concrete, building blocks, and the coral that is simply killed
by land based
pollution. Killing the reefs for aquariums makes a great
environmental story
but it is a lie fostered on an unknowing public by people whose
agenda has
very little to do with saving anything but their funding.

Moon
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/"Unless stated otherwise, comments made on this list do not necessarily
/ reflect the beliefs or goals of the North American Native Fishes
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/ This is the discussion list of the North American Native Fishes Association
/ nanfa_at_aquaria.net. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or get help, send the word
/ subscribe, unsubscribe, or help in the body (not subject) of an email to
/ nanfa-request_at_aquaria.net. For a digest version, send the command to
/ nanfa-digest-request_at_aquaria.net instead.
/ For more information about NANFA, visit our web page, http://www.nanfa.org