[Coral-List] [External Email] Re: Fw: Marine Aquarium Trade

[Lescinsky, Halard]

 I think Doug missed a key point in the paper, "Can the global marine aquarium trade (MAT) be a model for sustainable coral reef fisheries?"  The authors do in fact point out the need for a connection between the local community and the reef resource:  if a resource has local value it is more likely to be valued and taken care of by the local people.  There is certainly quite a bit in the conservation biology literature about this.

 The key is whether the usage is sustainable.  Though Garret Hardin famously pointed out the tendency of unregulated common resources to be over-consumed, there are certainly many sustainably managed fisheries out there today.  Most coral-list readers may not know that even the Great Barrier Reef has a sustainable live coral harvest industry, and the authors provide a global map showing threat levels from local aquarium harvest, and many areas are low.

The authors discuss how to make the harvest more sustainable and focus primarily on Green Consumerism:  supply chain transparency and a sustainable aquarium certification so that aquarium keepers can choose responsibly.  They reference Militz et al. 2017 who found that over 90% of aquarium hobbyists would pay more for sustainably harvested organisms- if they could identify them.  The authors also pointed out that compared to commercial fishing, aquarium fish are carefully selected and have a high value for a very small biomass individuals.  This makes the impact of aquarium catch much lower than might otherwise be expected.

 I think moving the aquarium industry in the right direction (towards sustainability and local value) has far more utility than wishing it didn't exist in the first place, or lumping all practices into the "bad" category just because some undoubtedly are.  In general, the people who have reef tanks are those that love reefs and the oceans and are the ones that we really need- the ones that care, even if they live thousands of miles away from the nearest reef.

Hal Lescinsky
Otterbein University
Westerville OH

________________________________
From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> on behalf of Douglas Fenner via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
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: [External Email] 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> 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…
> [http://www.sciencedirect.com<http://www.sciencedirect.com/>]www.sciencedirect.com<http://www.sciencedirect.com/>
> Judith S Weis
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Coral-List mailing list
> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
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