Mark,
I'm coming in late on this thread, and it looks like it has already degraded - I should probably sit on my hands, but I won't of course.
You should listen to Bill and Gresham - you may not always agree with them, but you'll learn something.
You mentioned earlier, (to paraphrase) that you simply could not fathom how such vast a resource as live reef fish could ever be harvested unsustainablly. That's what they said about cod in the North Atlantic (grin). There is proof that some species are being harvested faster than recruitment - just follow pricing trends for carpet anemones over the past thirty years and you'll see!
Can you give citations for "all the journal articles that have shown cyanide use on the decline..."? This is not true, as we discussed in another thread, and I would like to see who is writing that it is.
Aquarium ethics is one of my passions, I wrote a section on it in my Advanced Marine Aquarium Techniques book. I also just finished an article on aquarium conservation, but it hasn't been published yet. However, here is a section from it that discusses captive breeding:
Captive breeding
While many freshwater fishes and aquatic plants have been grown for the aquarium industry for many years, captive propagation of most marine aquarium specimens is much more difficult. Great strides are being made in this facet of aquarium husbandry and each year, more captive raised marine specimens are available in the pet trade. It is generally assumed that since these captive raised animals did not originate in the wild, that they have minimal impact on natural systems.
Captive breeding can serve to reduce the “wild take†of a species. A case in point might be the Mexican blind cave tetra. Rare in the wild, and found only in localized habitats, this fish is commonly sold in most pet stores for a few dollars because they are produced by the thousands in Florida fish farms. In order for this method to work, the cost of the wild counterpart to a species must be higher than the cost of the captive raised animal, and the quality of the latter must be higher.
Some captive breeding programs are designed with the goal of reintroduction of the animals to their native habitat. This is only a viable conservation method if the habitat can be repaired to the point that whatever deficiency that caused the species’ demise in the first place has been corrected. For example, some species of Haplochromine cichlids have become extinct in Lake Victoria due to the introduction of the predatory Nile perch. Some of these species are being maintained in captivity, but they cannot yet be returned to their natural habitat because the perch population is still too high in the lake. Another concern with population reintroductions is the possibility of non-native pathogens being returned to the wild along with the cultured species.
Jay Hemdal
P.S. â€"œ one more bit of rambling â€"œ wearing my Dr. Phil hat (as I’ve been told I do)
I ran into a similar problem you did with this thread - I posted something titled, "Calling out the Tang Police". I used that title in order to get people to read my post - on a very important topic. The problem is that it worked too well and three of the tang police came long and the thread completely fell apart because they could not see past the title. You used the word “pretentiousâ€Â, and I think that got people thinking you were a troll. Then again â€"œ perhaps you were just trolling?
