As a new member I thought I would jump right into the fray
First of all we should all go reread the introduction to Martin A Moe Jr.s Marine Aquarium Reference (Systems and invertebrates) (Martin is still the King)
Quote:
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The extremes of environmental rights and wrongs are easy to determine. It is very wrong to destroy a coral reef with dynamite to collect a few stunned angelfish and wrong to use cyanide and other methods that kill far more aquarium fish than they capture in good health. It is wrong to kill whales threatened with extinction, wrong to pollute with toxic waste. On the other hand, use of fish, shrimp, and lobsters for food is right if the fishing is so managed that the populations are not destroyed and the ecosystems are not damaged. It is right to use fish and invertebrates for scientific research to learn about the nature of these animals and the effects our activities have on the environment. However, as with birds and mammals, marine organisms are an aesthetic as well as a sustaining source, and this is where some conflict of opinion lies.
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Life in the sea is short and seldom sweet. Relatively few individual organisms survive to become adults, and most of those that do seldom live more than a year or two. In nature, the survival of the individual is rarely significant. It is the survival of the species that counts. An individual shrimp may be quickly inhaled by a grouper, scooped up in a shrimp net and frozen for market, or carefully collected and maintained in an aquarium for a few months. Whatever the fate of the individual animal and whatever, if any, human use is made of it, the loss of the animal to the environment is one thing, and the meaning of its death in human terms is something else.
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To those of you who are ranting I would suggest that you direct your energies towards the fisheries and some if their practices that kill off 1000s of waste fish and inverts every day, who knows they might adapt just fine.......
To HimSelf where do you reside,
Shame on you for not running a cold water tank. Some of the fish and inverts are just to cool for words and according to the people I talked to at the Vancouver aquarium easier to keep than the tropical types.
Cheers
Mitch#3