[Coral-List] Fw: Marine Aquarium Trade

[Judith Weis]

Corals are under existential threat from climate change. Additional threats from (legal or illegal) collecting are relatively small, but infuriating considering it's for someone's HOBBY.  Not their dinner, not subsistence income, but their hobby.
J
________________________________
From: Douglas Fenner <douglasfennertassi at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 6:40 PM
To: Judith Weis <jweis at newark.rutgers.edu>
Cc: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Fw: Marine Aquarium Trade

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<mailto: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><mailto: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/><http://www.sciencedirect.com/>
Judith S Weis


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