Originally Posted by Matt Pedersen

“Fish-collecting ban reso passes council – Supporters drown out opponents in testimony” was the news out of West Hawaii Today last week. If you thought the most recent proposal to ban marine aquarium fish collection in Hawaii was just going to go away like all the others, well, clearly it’s not.

Hawaii is rapidly becoming the battlegrounds of a “moral” war being waged against the marine aquarium collection industry – not surprisingly being spearheaded by people with vested interests in a) the diving industry and b) finding an easy scapegoat for the problems being claimed on some reefs in Hawaii.

Never mind that the expert testimony and science is on the side of the marine aquarium fishery because that’s not the point the opposition is raising in the first place. They’ll make whatever claim they feel best supports their arguments and elicits an emotional response, completely disregarding the actual facts and science. What is perhaps most alarming is that a) the committee actually heard this nonsense, b) they actually voted 6-2 in favor of the resolution despite hearing expert testimony to the contrary.

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Only 16 people submitted testimony in opposition to the ban? I was one of those 16 who submitted testimony. Only 15 other people did? If you want thriving and vibrant marine aquarium trade in the future, the answer seems abundantly clear – get organized and fight back. It’s going to take more than a couple aquarium authors speaking out against this madness – it is going to take the industry reaching out to it’s own constituents, and working with governmental management agencies, to not only provide the scientific and economical arguments, but to engage hobbyists to fight just as passionately for their hobby on the emotional and moral grounds being argued.

Originally Posted by Scott Radway

In 2000, the state started aggressively managing yellow
tang, the prize fi sh of the aquarium trade in Hawaii.
It was a move that came on the heels of community
concern that the fi sh were being overharvested.
Since, the yellow tang population along Kona coast
– the heart of the aquarium trade in Hawaii – has
increased an impressive 35 percent. But at the same
time, the number of yellow tangs collected for the
aquarium trade jumped 81 percent. The value of the
yellow tang catch overall increased 164 percent, leaping
from $383,000 to more than $1 million per year.
So there were more fi sh in the water, fi shermen
caught more and made more money.

Originally Posted by Matt Pedersen

As a marine aquarium hobbyist, not a researcher or scientist or commercial entity, I managed to breed and rear the Harlequin Filefish a few years back. I was the first person in the world to do it. I am anxiously awaiting the day that fellow marine fish breeders replicate my success with this species.

Ironically, the Harlequin Filefish is a guady Indo-Pacific reef fish that our hobby and industry had in fact written off as a “cut flower”, doomed to die in captivity. For decades many in fact did get collected and died in short order. The natural diet of this fish is exclusively certain corals, and in fact, research has shown that as coral reefs die off, this species is the first to vanish from the reefs (because it’s food source has died). This is a fish that may well go from common to facing extinction in the wild as climate change, ocean acidification and pollution wipe out its homes.

However, because of my singular efforts, and through the sharing of my discoveries in CORAL Magazine (article attached), the Harlequin Filefish now has a new future. It was not a governmental, academic, or educational institution, it was an experienced private individual, a Marine Aquarium Hobbyist, who sought out the challenge, tackled it, and gave it back to the world. I am not the first, nor will I be the last hobbyist, to make such a game changing discovery. If there had been a ban, an agreement, a white list of some sort, that said this “doomed to die” fish should never be harvested from the wild and sold, I would have never had the opportunity to make this game changing discovery, and I doubt any scientific or academic institution would’ve ever bothered to do what I did. Given the forecasts for reef loss, I think it is fair to say that the Harlequin Filefish’s fate has gone from “doomed in the wild” to “it may survive in the aquarium industry even if nowhere else”. Credit where it is due, the aquarium hobbyist, who gets his fish from the industry, made a game-changing contribution for the fate of this beautiful fish.

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If we look to the freshwater aquarium hobby, we see it already taking on this role. The next time you walk into most any FW fish store, you may see a fish called a “Red Tailed Shark”. That species is extinct in the wild. It wasn’t the aquarium trade, it was damming of native waters that wiped it out. Were it not for the fact that it is a popular aquarium fish, bred in immense numbers in fish farms in Asia, the Red-Tailed Shark would be gone. It exists, because the aquarium hobby exists. The only reason anyone is researching the breeding of fish like the Yellow Tang, is because of the aquarium hobby. I am sure every Hawaiian knows the Yellow Tang, the Huma Huma Triggerfish – these aren’t food fish, but they have monetary value in the aquarium trade. Humankind tends to only preserve that which it values. Banning the aquarium trade ensures you ban a group of people who actually care about the long term wild survivability of the yellow tang in the first place.

Originally Posted by kien (Post 642641)

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