Legal collection

[GreshamH]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=12478628#post12478628 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Xeroxman
Anyone have any idea where one would go to get a Cites?sp Permit? I have friends living in Tonga.. I'm sure there's something I need

Coonsidering Tonga is shut down at the moment that would not be a great place to try to get corals from. Furthermore it is illegal for you to simply collect yourself in Tonga. You would have to get one of the 5 permit holders to help you and that will cost

 

[icy1155]

You would be suprised what are some common corals in the oceans... Ricordea yuma, Acan sp., and all of these Zoanthids that people are paying 50$ a polyp for. For refrence while I was in Tobago last summer I saw the exact zoas sold as "Tubs Blues" for 10+$ a polp more commonly than you could imagine...some of the colonies that I saw were larger than my house. I have seen purple people eaters almost as commonly as the "Tubs Blues". Zoanthids are one of the most common corals in intertidal areas, yet they command a price that is astonomical, while some corals that are much more rare in nature such as Fox corals or Elegance dont cost nearly what they should for as rare as they are.

 

[billsreef]

Coral prices these days have nothing to do with how common or rare they are, but only marketing hype and fancy names. If you can call it an Uber Rare Japanese Atomic Whatchamacallit, the price just increased a hundred fold.

 

[greenbean36191]

Anyone have any idea where one would go to get a Cites?sp Permit? I have friends living in Tonga.. I'm sure there's something I need

Like GreshamH said, Tonga was recently closed. In general though, to get a CITES permit in the US you go through the FWS. Applying for a CITES permit isn't like applying for a fishing license though. The applications are a couple of pages long and you have to justify what you're doing with the animals, how they will be cared for, where they're coming from, etc. Often multiple permits are required and trying to determine which ones are needed is pretty confusing. Just the processing for each one can take 3 months and cost upwards of $150 for a one-time shipment. You also have to make sure the paperwork from the other end is kosher. A lot of people hire lawyers to help them through the process because finding out that your permit doesn't cover what you thought it did is an extremely expensive mistake. There's a reason there are so few people importing and exporting corals. The legal hoops make it confusing, time consuming, and prohibitively expensive unless you do it in high volume.

Like others have mentioned, if you're really intent on trying to get your animals from the source, go through a licensed local exporter.

 

[RichardS]

My favorite rare coral is Palua Green Nepthea/Sinulari. It is extinct in the wild, common on ebay.