Selling Hard Corals from Florida Waters

[darkdruid]

I know it's illegal to harvest hard stony corals from US waters, but is it illegal to sell them also? I worked at various LFS for several years and noticed that alot of the aquacultured live rock from places like Tampa Bay Saltwater and several others, often came in with small green pea to dime size colonies of quite a variaty of different stonies.

If they were to be chipped off and grown out and fragged, would they be legal to sell, and do you think there would be a market for Carribean stonies? It seems to me that it would be a great source of corals you rarely, if ever, see on the market.

 

[LockeOak]

I don't know anything about Tampa Bay Saltwater or their practices, but any corals, including hard corals, that settle on artificial substrate such as live rock farms can be legally harvested. Most of the enforcement occur at the point of collection. The onus is on the aquaculturist, however, to prove that what they're collecting is in fact artificial. Live rock farmers therefore use non-aragonite rock to show that it's not wild harvested.

As to whether there would be a market, to be honest Caribbean corals generally just aren't very attractive. I'm a graduate student working on coral reef biology and we do most of our work in the Florida Keys. Last year after the Internation Coral Reef Symposium we took some visiting extremely well known scientists from Australia out to see some of our research sites. Seeing as they do their work on the Great Barrier Reef, they were underwhelmed, to say the least. "Everything's brown!" was a common statement. The most striking species is probably Acropora palmata, which is both a threatened, protected species (and especially hard hit in U.S. waters) and forms colonies that are just too big for most aquaria. The branches are the size of your arm.

 

[C4DC]

TBSW has a permit to aquaculture rock in a specific site(s) of several acres. They can and do remove small coral colonies and sell them seperate from the live rock they sell. The colors really don't pop, but there are some pretty neat pieces they have on occasion. I found a nice brain the size of a tennis ball for $5 one time when I was there; it lived hapily in my friend's tank for several years.

 

[chimmike]

I think commercial permits allow harvesting of some corals, I'm not sure.

 

[darkdruid]

Most of the small corals on the rock get buried under the pile in a tank and die anyway so they aren't a big selling point for live rock. I have a deal with a LFS, they get a shipment of rock and I get to pop off any corals I find for a buck each, no matter where the rock is from. I prefer the Tampa Bay rock for coral hunting though for the simple reason, it's shipped in water. There is a much higher survival rate for anything you find on it.

 

[ser_renely]

I do know there is A LOT of store owners in FLA who illegally get live rock and corals. Sad, but true. Most go to the Bahamas and exploit it there.

 

[haydenp]

I'm not sure about all the details, but I know at work we have a permit to have Atlantic corals in our tank, and its a serious deal.

 

[Peter Eichler]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14727752#post14727752 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by haydenp
I'm not sure about all the details, but I know at work we have a permit to have Atlantic corals in our tank, and its a serious deal.

Huh, what, where do you work?

 

[haydenp]

Discovery World on the lakefront next to Summerfest. We have a small Atlantic Reef Tank for which we had to get a permit from the Feds before we could obtain and keep some of the corals from a research institution partner in Fla.

 

[Peter Eichler]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14727898#post14727898 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by haydenp
Discovery World on the lakefront next to Summerfest. We have a small Atlantic Reef Tank for which we had to get a permit from the Feds before we could obtain and keep some of the corals from a research institution partner in Fla.

Ok, that makes sense... I haven't been there since before most of the displays were funtional.

 

[DGee]

I wouldn't be surprised to see corals and rock illegally harvested for sale in the florida area, I spend a lot of time in the gulf area and I decided I would check out a lfs or two before my flight out last september.

At one of the stores there was a french angel that was at least 16"- 17" I was disgusted to see that they had this beautiful fish in a nasty 55 gallon tank and as I was looking at this beautiful fish the employee who I believe was the owner walked over and said, pretty fish huh? We just took it out of a customers tank... There was an obvious hook mark in the side of the mouth... As far as I can remember that is definitely NOT legal. They had a frag tank that looked worse than my rubbermaids after 300lbs of base rock curing filled with recordia and what looked like florida fire coral and a few other brown things.

Needless to say I forget how blessed I am living on the west coast and to have such great LFS.