Tank raised Purple Tangs!

These are not captive bred, correct?

I just don't want people to confuse "tank raised" with "captive bred" as the term is used loosely.
 
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I like the gem tang i'm tank raising better. :rollface:

Gem.jpg
 
Isn't tank raised where they collect the larval fish and raise them up from there? Still from the wild but most larval fish don't survive to adulthood so not depleting the population of adult fish. And maybe they are more used to captive conditions, so probably a good thing.
 
Tank raised means fish were collected immediately after larval settlement and raised in captivity. They had wild parents that mated in wild and their whole larval stage took place in the wild.

Captive bred means parents mated in captivity and the egg development, larval stage and larval settlement and post-larval development all happened in captivity.

As a side note, tank raised fish are one of the most sustainable ways of collecting aquarium fish. Fish produce far more offspring that would survive. So most of the larvae that manages to settle will not reach adulthood. By collecting fish at this early state, you cause minimum amount of damage to the breeding population and since there is always excess offspring, some reach adulthood and population remains healthy.

You can think of this like the following example; Lets say the environment only supports 50 new fish each year. But each year fish produce around 1000 offspring that reach to their post-larval stage. Even if you catch 500 of the fish just reached past-larval stage, there would still be 10 times more fish in the ecosystem than that would reach to adulthood. So the population remains healthy.
 
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Hey, I'm all for it.

It should bring down the costs substantially.

And make for healthier, and happier, fish.

It sounds like a win-win.
 
You can think of this like the following example; Lets say the environment only supports 50 new fish each year. But each year fish produce around 1000 offspring that reach to their post-larval stage. Even if you catch 500 of the fish just reached past-larval stage, there would still be 10 times more fish in the ecosystem than that would reach to adulthood. So the population remains healthy.

Not to knock it that bad, but those 500 you catch and remove would not just go poof if left in the system, but become a food source that some other thing might be dependent on. So yeah, it isn't the same as removing adult fish in droves, but it still will have impact to some degree.

On a worst case view it may lead to less predators because of lack of food, which then causes a population boom of the target species which then leads to them stripping the environment of their food source and a population collapse. To go that far it would have to be pretty substantial larval harvest though... And a substantial adult harvest would basically skip all the previous steps to the last one anyway (and then in turn lead to the first one).
 
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