Ethical Advice for a New Reefer

[49.35 North]

Hi, I'm a complete newbie but I've been blown away by the beauty of what I've seen on Reef Central, and like a lot of reefers I have geekish tendencies that make the technology attractive, so I'm keen to start a tank. At the same time, I'm concerned about the environmental footprint, so I'm looking for advice on best practices from an environmental perspective.

ReefsUK dot org has a number of suggestions:

Propagate Corals - Propagate all your corals and swap or sell these frags with other hobbyists

Breed Marine Fish - Attempt to breed the marine fish you keep and pass on your knowledge and experiences to others in the hobby

Buy Frags - Buy frags/propagated corals from other hobbyists rather than buying corals removed from the reefs

Offset Your Impact - Donate a percentage of the purchase price for each marine animal you buy to a reef conservation organisation.

They also suggest reefers should support the Marine Aquarium Council (MAC), but cortez marine convinced me that it has crashed and burned.

I'd add one more practice to their list:

Reduce CO2 emissions - offset the energy used by the tank by reducing other energy use the home and/or car, making the tank energy-neutral.

Any other advice?

 

[JHemdal]

Here is a simple one: keep your wild caught animals alive for an appropriate amount of time. If you get into that "kill-replace cycle" you are simply going to use more resources. Want to reduce your wild take by 50%, just keep a fish alive twice as long!

Jay

 

[billsreef]

Basically Jay has it nailed IMO. This means taking the time to your research on tank set up and any species you are interested in, before acquiring it Do your best to provide the best you can for any given critter in your care, and it's the best scenario all around

 

[T Diddy]

Solar tubes is a great idea...I'd actually try it if my tank wasn't in the basement.

 

[returnofsid]

Solar tubes is a great idea...I'd actually try it if my tank wasn't in the basement.

However, by having it in the basement, you're cutting down on the need to chill your tank! Thus, saving energy to run a chiller!!

 

[49.35 North]

Here is a simple one: keep your wild caught animals alive for an appropriate amount of time. If you get into that "kill-replace cycle" you are simply going to use more resources. Want to reduce your wild take by 50%, just keep a fish alive twice as long!

Jay

Thanks, good advice and I'll do my best. I guess that means no tangs and no anemones

 

[dwd5813]

there are a lot of ways a new reefer can approach the hobby with conservation of both natural reef resources and energy in mind. when it comes to equipment selection, do your research into which items consume the least and use what they consume the most efficiently. as for livestock, your options are vast.

firstly, live rock. we would all love to fill our tanks with the best quality rock we can find. with a bit of patience though, you can have a beautiful tank full of excellent rock either by starting with dry or aquacultured rock. another option is to cruise your local club forum where it's likely you'd find someone breaking down a tank, downsizing, leaving the hobby, etc. and selling off their rock, often for as little as 1 dollar a pound.

this same resource is exploitable when searching out your fish and coral choices. those breaking down a tank often search for another reefer to take care of their fish before turning them back in to the local fish store. even those not breaking down or getting out may have fish they no longer wish to keep as they move in a new direction with their tank. corals are almost always available in my local club and i suspect it is similar in others as folks see their tanks shrinking while coral growth spreads across them.

all of the suggestions mentioned in the op are great. perhaps the greatest suggestion of all however is the one made by JHemdal and reinforced by billsreef: learn how to take care of whatever you plan to keep BEFORE you buy it. this includes everything from food requirements to space to equipment and time commitments. it is the greatest favor you can do both for your tank and yourself. good luck.

 

[49.35 North]

firstly, live rock. we would all love to fill our tanks with the best quality rock we can find. with a bit of patience though, you can have a beautiful tank full of excellent rock either by starting with dry or aquacultured rock.

Thanks dwd5813, good advice.

I live in the Philippines and a lot of the reefs here haven't always been treated with tender loving care in the past. That's changing, at least in some areas, but it means there's often sizable pieces of rubble, weighing as much as 8-10 lbs, lying on the beach. Do you see any problem recycling these in a reef tank?

 

[mauger1]

thanks

 

[dwd5813]

i would be somewhat wary of rock i found at the beach. it could be excellent rock, but then it could also be full of unwanted pollutants. i have no experience collecting rock so hopefully someone else can help more with that. as far as i can say, it'd be a coinflip.

there are manmade rock options as well. you can find interesting looking rocks in members' tanks here that were handmade and now look 100% like natural liverock. take a cruise through the diy forum and ask around about making rock.

 

[49.35 North]

Thanks dwd. I was thinking more from an ethical point of view - is it ok to take anything from a reef habitat? - but I take your point about possible pollution.

I'm thinking probably Aquaroche, as it seems to make aquascaping easy and requires a minimum of work.

 

[philosophile]

Is it ethical to take something from the reef habitat? Hmm... I think this is a case of the Tragedy of the Commons. Shared or common resources (think air or water) are for all of us to use (like Reefs). But when we all partake in the resource, the resource becomes destroyed. So individually there may not be any particular wrong, but when everyone does it, a serious wrong occurs. So I think it is an obligation for us not to abuse resources like these. A drop in the bucket begins to add up to an entire bucket.

 

[ackee]

Phil, I assume you are an Ethicist. The only other group of professional philosophers I am aware of are college/university faculty in very small departments, but my experience (30 years as a professor of English Literature) is that faculty have little concern with ethics, beyond such things as recycling plastic trash.

The few Ethicists I've known work for hospitals, NGOs, etc. I know of none working for investment banks or brokerage houses. Has there been a quiet revolution going on? Have Wall Street firms begun setting up ethical revue and oversight committees?

 

[ChicagoReefOne]

Thanks, good advice and I'll do my best. I guess that means no tangs and no anemones

Maybe no to tangs but you can acquire a cloned anemone from other hobbyists :dance:

Same with live rock, you can acquire "seeded" pieces that have the beneficial bacteria already in them from other hobbyists and then use mostly dry rock to build your rockwork and over time it will all become live. I'd imagine you could find some article telling you how to treat dry rock on shore for use.

 

[philosophile]

Yes, I'm an ethicist... or more precisely, my area of specialization in my studies is Ethics. I was a philosophy major in college. I teach philosophy at a Community college in Northern California.

As far as I know there are no ethical oversight committees within wall street companies. And as a practical matter, that would really be a serious hindrance to bankers, even if their resident ethicist said what they were doing wasn't wrong. Financial transactions in this day and age are done millions an hour. Employing all the ethicists in the united states still would make the process insanely slow.

Even if we didn't review every transaction, but rather the company's over-all strategies, there would be thousands of funds and accounts to look at. It wouldn't be very practical.

So the burden of ethical examination falls on the individual employees, and thus I need to teach them better.

 

[ackee]

Among the most daunting tasks you take upon yourself ('and thus I need to...') is explaining the differences between things that are legal because they are not specifically illegal, and things/action that are unethical even when not illegal. This is a complicated task, its logic frequently difficult for students to internalize, focused as they tend to be on rewards and punishments. The law, in short, as compared to justice: very divergent and incongruent approaches in practice. Law is more cleanly defined than ethics, thus more easily applied.

Ethics itself is rat's nest of competing conceps, many of them variations on pragmatism, situational ethics, and Kantian categorical imperatives. One of my favorite thinkers, Philippa Foot, died last week. Her seminal 'trolley problem' and its many permutations, did a lot to integrate Kantian absolutism into more relativistic approaches.

My experience is that few students will employ such vexing consideration when they are in a position to deal with real world issues. As so many before them, they will ask "who is in charge, and what do they want?" I tended to integrate moral issues with writing in some advanced courses. Cicely Bok's study about the ethics of lying was a favorite. I like Bok because, under it all, she was really a reluctant Kantian. I enjoyed having students wrestle in their analytic papers with the principles she established in her original work extended into more ambiguous areas.
Good luck with raising the consciousness of your students. My guess is that the administration will flap like a flag in the breeze public opinion, and have you dealing with the 'ethics' of cyberbullying.

 

[philosophile]

Heh its one of the first things I teach them (that the Law and Ethics are not the same), and its one of the last things they learn.

I didn't hear the Phillipa Foot died. That really is a tragedy. The Trolley case is fantastic, and what Judith Jarvis Thompson did with them really made them amazing.

Thankfully I have a pretty good administration. Professors have strong control over the course content, but they just want us to show that we are meeting the goals that we set for ourselves. So no commandment to teach about cyberbullying, but I have mentioned the clear wrongness of it in class with the recent suicide.

 

[micrors4racer]

Yes, I'm an ethicist... or more precisely, my area of specialization in my studies is Ethics. I was a philosophy major in college. I teach philosophy at a Community college in Northern California.

As far as I know there are no ethical oversight committees within wall street companies. And as a practical matter, that would really be a serious hindrance to bankers, even if their resident ethicist said what they were doing wasn't wrong. Financial transactions in this day and age are done millions an hour. Employing all the ethicists in the united states still would make the process insanely slow.

Even if we didn't review every transaction, but rather the company's over-all strategies, there would be thousands of funds and accounts to look at. It wouldn't be very practical.

So the burden of ethical examination falls on the individual employees, and thus I need to teach them better.

Where do you teach in norcal? I am a local student

 

[philosophile]

Ohlone College.

 

[micrors4racer]

You know whats crazy? I go there. Fremont Campus