[Coral-List] "Worst places to harvest coral for aquarium trade?"

Coral Morphologic coralmorphologic at gmail.com
Sun Apr 9 17:27:22 EDT 2017


Hi Andrew,

That is exactly the intent of the system being set up in the Philippines,
where live coral collection has been outlawed since the 1980's (when the
curio trade was much larger). In 2013 after the USS Guardian warship
grounded itself on their World Heritage Tubbataha Reef, the US was fined $2
million to restore it. But without any coral mariculture infrastructure
(the way Indonesia does), there was no immediate way to do it. Local
officials on Lubong Island approached a progressive net-caught tropical
fish exporter named Barnett Shutman (RVS Fishworld) about establishing and
managing a coral mariculture farm *inside* the marine park that could
contribute to reef restoration efforts and engage the local economy. They
proposed that for every one maricultured corals exported, two will be
replanted back to the reef. It is now several years since the farm broke
underwater ground, but I'm not sure any corals have been exported yet. No
doubt there is a tremendous amount of red tape to wade through and national
laws to change before the first corals are exported. The opportunity for
aquarists to access clones from endemic Filipino species and color morphs
is a value added premium they will eagerly pay. It is a model that other
coral reef countries should consider, but it will require a clear success
before the paradigm can change. I hope that Philippines will be that
successful story.

Cheers,
Colin
Coral Morphologic


On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Andrew Pederson <andrew at reefheart.com>
wrote:

> Just a thought,
> Ideally, in the hopefully not too distant future, there will be many large
> coral nurseries around the globe set up for replenishing / healing various
> reef ecosystems... these nurseries will need a lot of funding, right? How
> about sales of a portion of nursury bred corals to aquarium trades,
> possible I think.
>
> Andrew
>


More information about the Coral-List mailing list