Unfortunately MAC has gone by the wayside... for now. It suffered in the same manner that the ORA mandarins did: ignorance prevailed. Most hobbyists are going to purchase livestock based on price alone.
If I'm sure of one thing, it's the hobby will be shut down sooner than later if something like MAC isn't reinstated. We need consistent data to provide outsiders questioning the industry. The animals deserve basic standards across the supply chain (collection, export, import, wholesale, retail) that right now do not exist. In every facet of the aforementioned chain there are people taking short cuts to keep price low at the cost of animals lives. Which of course is inexcusable.
There was a closed door round table session at MACNA last year where top industry individuals discussed the resurrection of MAC, or initiating something similar.
Aqua-culture is the best way to sustain the hobby, but it is expensive which drives up the price of common species and therefore a customer may regard the price tag in the store over the sustainability of how the species got to the store in the first place.
It took me a long time to wrap my mind around the fact that aquaculture is generally no better than a sustainably wild collected fish; in fact some conservation of wild reefs relies on wild collection of animals.
Who's the best breeder of fishes in the world? Who's the best coral farmer? Mother nature. The amount of fish raised in the ocean, and coral grown, obviously is much, much greater than anything we could ever hope to accomplish in captivity. The problem is getting them
sustainably collected, and
properly handled along the way.
If collectors target a specific area too frequently, and remove the the wrong size and/or sex of fish, that target area is likely to be devoid of target species pretty quickly. If collectors only target large males of say, a wrasse species, and a few smaller females, then we know the dominant female will change sex and continue to breed repopulating the target area quickly. Of course the same can be said with coral: remove a frag of a colony, not the colony, which will regrow quickly.
Small developing island nations rely on natural reefs as a source of income and food. If they're taught how to properly collect animals they will protect their source of income and food. If no one is purchasing their collected animals then they will be forced to find income in some other manner, which is going to be selling the fishes for food. Of course people want the bigger fishes, no matter the sex, which will generally lead to overfishing an area.
Many of these island nations have been mariculturing coral as well, which is another phenomenal way to aid in conserving wild reefs. Small frags are taken from parent colonies to be grown out in neighboring lagoons. Those frags are fragged, and so on...
Finally, [to my knowledge] none of the bills that have been brought to the table to ban the trade differentiates between wild collected, maricultured, or aquacultured animals. They're a blanket ban, making that clownfish bred in Michigan just as illegal as one imported from Bali.
Aquaculture in captivity has a very large carbon footprint compared to importing a fish. It is of course incredibly important, and should definitely be supported, but we cannot think of it as the
only way
I linked his website on the first page of this thread, although I don't believe it goes back far enough to cover anything regarding MAC.
