Rockys_Pride
New member
lol, Paul Watson 'nuff said.
:bounce1:3rd world countries have limits on what can be exported yet a state in the USA doesn't have collection limits? In most cases I'd want some regulations in place and not leave the fox to guard the hen house.
In addition, as I mentioned in my first post, about 70% of the Yellow Tang's range (and let's face it, collection of ornamental fish in Hawaii is mostly Yellow Tangs) is within the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which are completely protected
better late than never.
Truth to be told, i know nothing about a whales intelligence level. Don't even know how they measure it in these animals?
I would have no objections if whaling was banned (I would LIKE to trust that such a decision is a correct one), I don't live in a threatened community where sea life is the only choice, but as of now; If I get served a whale steak, I'll devour it like any other animal without to much (if any) regret other than it was once an animal and we killed it.
@ the guy with mercury on his brain, in Norway such is not allowed sold or eaten (there are of course limits, witch is pretty low as a world standard), we have experiences of putting down flocks of animals due to exposure to irradiation, sickness and exposure to other pollutants.
I would however like to draw a few pictures for you:
Imagine a country or even countries who depends on something like dogs and cats. Where it is so deeply rooted that when now, when not in need of these animals, they are so domesticated and behave as a natural part of the family.
In china they eat everything, even our domestic and smart enough animals.
Another picture; Image these countries again seeing Animal planet and the animals police in the US. Seriously, I KNOW americans who do love their animals, but do you guys really treat our best friends like that?
TV and media does not make money on showing goodness, but rather problems and catastrophy and only the bad episodes of a hunt is shown, also the mistreated dogs and starved cats and horses so thin you can see trough them. Now, no money in showing happy dogs in a good big bed and a cat playing with a paper, neither a successful hunt where its over before it even started.
Loved the south park episode. And I have to laugh that on the very channel that whale wars is on I have seen Bear Grylls and the other "survival shows" brutally kill hundreds of animals for no more than entertainment purposes. Maybe the Sea Shepherd should spend his time following Bear around and throwing stink bombs at him every time he tries to bite the head off a snake, rather than blindly attacking the aquarium hobby.
That's exactly what's in place in Hawai'i and precisely why people are saying that Snorkel Bob is a joke for setting his sites on Hawaiian collectors.We talked about a similar issue regarding fisheries in an environmental problems class at my university, one of the techniques that allows a fishery to keep some manner of sustainability or at least to bolster its numbers is by making swaths of the ocean protected. Several protected zones seperated by fishable areas. This allows a refuge for BOFFs which produce far more offspring than the smaller ones and increases the life expectency of the fish evidenced by the fact that the surrounding unprotected zones see a great increase in fish caught by fishermen as well as the average size of the fish. Maybe this could be applied to the reefs. Make zones where NOTHING at all can be harvested, caught, etc. that are surrounded by catchable areas.
"....once conditions in the ocean get bad enough to wipe out reefs worldwide...."
No. To put it quite bluntly, anyone who wrote that hobbyists are going to repopulate reefs if warming wipes them out is more out of touch with reality than Snorkel Bob. More likely what you're remembering was programs like in the Keys where farmers are growing out corals to restore those lost due to local impacts like disease or ship groundings.
Restoring widespread loss is an entirely different ballgame.
Unless we're seriously underestimating the mixing and turnover rates of the ocean, once conditions in the ocean get bad enough to wipe out reefs worldwide it would take hundreds to thousands of years for conditions to return to normal. In other words, if we make the water bad enough to drive wild reefs to extinction, the water will stay that bad for longer than a restoration plan can wait it out.
I'm going to have to go on a "link hunt" soon. Someone had forwarded a link (actually I think it was posted on another site) that was absolutely mezmerizing. It was a series of timelapsed clips showing divers in the pacific setting out HUGE racks of colorful frags in the middle of an area that had obviously been through a very devistating bleaching event. The timelapsed clips of the frags growing into huge colonies on the racks, then harvested (fragged), frags set in various locations of a now barren lagoon, and finally the new colonies they'd grown into.
I don't think we can entirely discount what we've learned and possibly what this hobby pushed along because it was made profitable in the last 10 to 15 years.
Do I think we'll some day dip into livingroom reef tanks to repopulate barren reefs? No, I certainly wouldn't take it that far either. But I'd like to think that our willingness to spend hundreds on a square inch of living coral has helped "facilitate" some of the grass roots efforts to repopulate reefs in distress right now.
In any event, we do not have the animals we need to successfully restore reefs. Reefs house a huge amount of diversity and they depend heavily on that diversity to function. Without the suite of herbivore, algae take over and smother the corals. Without the corals there is no framework and no structural complexity to attract fish. Without the fish the corals come under attack of algae and inverts. Hobbyists only house a very small part of the necessary diversity in tanks and an even smaller percentage of what we do keep has been bred in captivity. As it stands, if we put all of the species currently kept in the hobby together, we still would not be able to come up with the diversity we need to rebuild a functional reef from scratch. What's more, once reefs are gone in the wild, most of the diversity of fish and inverts we have have in the hobby would be gone within a few years.
Last but not least, the animals we keep are not even potential candidates for restoration projects. There's no way to know where they originally came from or in many cases even what species they actually are. They've also been exposed to animals from all around the world which poses a risk or introducing new pathogens to the reefs we're trying to restore.
I think the biggest problem with attempted aquaculture is that it simply costs too much without enough of a return for growers and stores.