[Coral-List] Fw: Marine Aquarium Trade

[Douglas Fenner]

Thank you.

  It also strikes me that the article I pointed to says that the value of
corals in the live aquarium trade provides an incentive for conservation.
I think they mean that if you profit from the live coral aquarium trade,
you don't want to lose the resources you make money off of.  However, I
would argue that there is a greater incentive to exploit the resource.
This probably fits under the titles "scramble competition" and "the tragedy
of the commons."  Namely, whoever gets to it first, gets the best pickings,
and if you are late to the picnic there may not be anything much left to
eat.  So there is an incentive to exploit the population faster and as much
as you can.  Garret Hardin wrote a famous paper in Science long ago
entitled "Tragedy of the Commons."  Exploitations of nature can fit into
this category, especially fisheries.  In fisheries, it is sometimes called
"the race for fish."  The collection of wild corals for the aquarium trade
is an invertebrate fishery.  Corals that are farmed are not a fishery, but
there are hybrid systems where people are alleged to take corals from the
wild, grow them larger in captivity, and then ship them to the US or
Europe, the largest and second-largest buyers of living corals for
aquaria.  People can grow them completely in nurseries for the trade, but
it is probably faster, easier, and cheaper to collect them.  There is
pressure on countries to better regulate coral fisheries and to shift to
farming corals for the trade.
       Coral fisheries are a threat to corals, however, they are a
relatively small threat compared to the big threats such as climate change,
land-based pollution, overfishing (of fish) and disease.  It could have
intense effects if there are small, heavily exploited areas, and on rare,
slow-growing or reproducing corals that are popular in the trade (such as
rare fleshy corals).  All threats add to the total threat to corals, but
some threats add much more threat than others.

Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–1248.

Cheers, Doug


On Tue, Dec 12, 2023 at 3:53 AM Judith Weis via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 10:47 AM Judith Weis <jweis at newark.rutgers.edu
> <mailto:jweis at newark.rutgers.edu>> wrote:
> Regarding the marine aquarium trade as a "model for sustainability," there
> is a great deal of illegal coral being imported to the US (and probably
> elsewhere)
>
>
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0964569120302155
> Trends and patterns of imports of legal and illegal live corals into the
> United States<
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0964569120302155>
> Coral reefs are the fundamental building blocks of tropical marine
> ecosystems. They are also one of the most endangered ecosystems on the
> planet suffe…
> www.sciencedirect.com<http://www.sciencedirect.com/>
> Judith S Weis
>
>
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