VR28man
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This article discusses the collection and cultivation issues about the Banggai Cardinal. However, it's about captive breeding of organisms vs wild collection in general - not restricted to fish.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...pJobID=1280256029&spReportId=MTI4MDI1NjAyOQS2
I think this is particularly good because this issue is actually a complicated one. Aquaculture, especially in controlled environments like ORA does, is not necessarily always the "best" solution.
(not to disparage ORA, which runs an excellent operation, and whom I'd buy from over wild collection in every case)
I left a comment:
There are cases where local collection is good, maybe best. For aquarium fish: breeding them in tanks where they have minimal impact on the local environment also means that the breeder has to use an enormous amount of electricity (fossil fuel pollution), compared to it being free if you take juvenile fish from the ocean. So it really depends on the species' suitability to aquaculture, and how well managed the fishery is.
In many impoverished tropical areas, they can either sell the fish locally as a food source, or they can get a lot more money by selling it for the aquarium trade. Proper supply chain monitoring has (albeit imperfectly) reduced the use of destructive fishing practices for the aquarium trade, while destructive practices (blowing up corals to stun the fish) for the local restaurant industry continues. Sometimes people will only value things if there's a price attached to it.
Final thing on the Banggai Cardinal: there is US based, in-tank, aquaculture for this fish too (it's actually very easy to breed even unintentionally; I got mine from an accidental brood in a neighbor's tank). But the Thai aquaculture has established invasive populations in Thailand and other places. In fact, I think the population counts show that the invasive populations are greater than the populations in their home range.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...pJobID=1280256029&spReportId=MTI4MDI1NjAyOQS2
I think this is particularly good because this issue is actually a complicated one. Aquaculture, especially in controlled environments like ORA does, is not necessarily always the "best" solution.
(not to disparage ORA, which runs an excellent operation, and whom I'd buy from over wild collection in every case)
I left a comment:
There are cases where local collection is good, maybe best. For aquarium fish: breeding them in tanks where they have minimal impact on the local environment also means that the breeder has to use an enormous amount of electricity (fossil fuel pollution), compared to it being free if you take juvenile fish from the ocean. So it really depends on the species' suitability to aquaculture, and how well managed the fishery is.
In many impoverished tropical areas, they can either sell the fish locally as a food source, or they can get a lot more money by selling it for the aquarium trade. Proper supply chain monitoring has (albeit imperfectly) reduced the use of destructive fishing practices for the aquarium trade, while destructive practices (blowing up corals to stun the fish) for the local restaurant industry continues. Sometimes people will only value things if there's a price attached to it.
Final thing on the Banggai Cardinal: there is US based, in-tank, aquaculture for this fish too (it's actually very easy to breed even unintentionally; I got mine from an accidental brood in a neighbor's tank). But the Thai aquaculture has established invasive populations in Thailand and other places. In fact, I think the population counts show that the invasive populations are greater than the populations in their home range.
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