Math; trops vs. food fishes
Math; trops vs. food fishes
I briefly scanned this thread, valid points all around, but i'll maintain that the $value of marine animals for the aquarium trade/hobby blows doors off of the commercial fishing industries prices. I know it's a vague statement, but commercial fishing slays actual tonnage annually for pennies on the dollar. I'm yankin these numbers out of thin air but for example
:
Numbers out of thin air?
Need not be.
I have been in a Mexican fishing villlage for the past month and have access to the tonnage of fishes that are taken every day, every week, every month and every year for the past 8 years...as every days catch per fisher is recorded for purposes of payment.
Divers in Loreto, Baja had to go back to food fishing after my partner died 8 years ago and have taken an amazing amount of biomass from the sea since then.
The tonnage of food fishes taken by each
out of work fish collector is incredible.
The trade off of food fish vs. aquarium fish is knowable but really....who wants to know?
Common sense already tells you an obvious truth if one has any sense of the subject matter:
1. Food fishes tend to be older then the tropicals, hence it takes longer for them to replace themselves...many tropicals are produced inside a single year.
2. Food fishes tend to be predominantly predator fishes like sharks, groupers, snappers etc. which cost much more for the environment to produce then the herbivore and omnivores that tend to be the ornamentals. It takes generations of tropical fish to make a 30 lb snapper.
3. Food fishes suffer much more as they are their extraction is abetted by entire populations of everyone in the region, the market and the country. Tropicals have a much smaller market of consumers.
4.Tropical fish dollars are measureds in ounces....food fishes in kilos. On average it takes a pickup truck full of food fishes to equal a few buckets of tropicals.
5. Tropicals are an alternative that pays better, recruits faster and are available all year round. They keep fishers from joining in and adding to the relentless, commercial hounding of food fishes to scarcity.
If it ment a differance, a good solid study could be made to show how many thousands and thousands of fishes disappear from an area when net collecting tropical fish collectors are laid off....
MAKE NO MISTAKE, stopping tropical fish collecting merely amplifies fishing impacts as fish collectors tend to be fisherman to begin with and heavy handed commercial fishing is their default occupation.
If evil.....net collecting tropical fishing is a far lesser one and reduces take from the sea. Tropical world fishers have few alternatives besides fishing and will not go hungry....quietly.
Nearly everyone of them who might be stopped....would keep fishing commercially. Perhaps this would give the illusion of "saving something".....but in reality and mathematically it would kill much more.
Steve
in Baja, Mexico
This is so true and obvious if you are ever in a fishing and collecting area