Are 90% of Aquarium Fish Wild Caught?
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According to a recent article 90% of aquarium fish are wild caught, and that’s destroying the ocean. Is this even close to the truth? And are wild caught fish even an issue that the aquarists need to be concerned about?
The first episode back after an unplanned break Ruth explores something that she’s passionate about. How aquarists can use their hobby as a real conservation tool.
Welcome back to the Tropical Fishkeeping UK podcast. It’s been a little bit of a break. I thought I’d take a few weeks off and here we are. But on the positive I am back. Sorry if I sound croaky guys. I’ve had a lurgy that’s been going around the past few weeks, but I am pretty much back up and running.
So this was going to be a thoroughly thought out, sensible discussion on parameters, looking at the science behind them, why they matter, what you need to do, all that good stuff. And it was going to be next week. But it’s not because I was merrily perusing the Book of Faces. And then someone, Sue sent me an article, and the article reads ‘Exotic pet fish owners are accidentally ruining the ocean.’ And oh, it is so bad. I’m going to quote Sam Scalz comment in the comments on this article. “this is about as bad as misinformation gets.” One hundred percent correct, Sam. And also the word accidentally. That annoys me. I mean, my dad used to claim- dad was a diver in the oil game. All that fun. Back in the seventies, dad used to claim that he accidentally blew up a reef. He accidentally blew it up by putting a whole load of charges on it and setting them off. Yeah, the word accidentally is the least of the issues in this, so I won’t read the whole article because, you know, copyright and stuff like that.
“Your living room aquarium filled with exotic fish might be one of the many reasons the planet isn’t doing so well right now.” Yeah, yeah. That’s the reason anyway. “New research reveals that a crazy ninety percent of aquarium fish sold in the US are wild caught, not bred in captivity. That means every time someone buys a neon “tetra. Guys. Neon tetra. Just just remember that bit for the next line from “neon tetra or clownfish from an online retailer, there’s a solid chance it was yanked straight from a coral reef.” Neon tetra yanked straight from a coral reef. Yeah, of course, “that’s disrupting delicate ocean ecologies”. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. This this podcast is going to be full of strange noises, of absolute rage. But you’ve got to laugh. I mean, this journalist is so good at their stuff that they didn’t even check that they were talking about a fish that lives on a coral reef or, you know, in the ocean rather than Blackwater habitats up a river in South America. But let’s let’s just ignore minor things like that. Or a clownfish, I’m going to say journalist again. Um, I had a quick run through this through an AI detector, and it was about sixty odd percent chance that it’s AI. It could be human. It’s very potentially AI wrote this. But you think even AI would know that a neon tetra isn’t on a coral reef? But that’s one side. The other example, clownfish famously farmed, famously cultivated. I mean, they they are one of the big success stories of the marine aquarium trade. This is their new research reveals the crazy ninety percent of aquarium fish sold in the UK are wild caught, not bred in captivity. And if anyone’s sensible, they’re going. No, no. The bulk of the fish sold for aquariums are most definitely not wild caught. Yeah, here’s where the slice issues come in. The article that they’re quoting, or the the Journal article that they are using to reference this. And there is some research behind it. I’m not I’m not one hundred percent happy with the research, but there is research behind that published in Conservation Biology. Extent of the threats to marine fish from the online aquarium trade in the United States and the abstract the golden golden. I’m going to leave all the mistakes in today so you guys get to hear all the fumbles. The global marine aquarium hobby is a multibillion dollar industry, largely driven by demand from the United States. I’m going to disagree with that one straight off. There’s a growing demand from East Asia. Europe isn’t a tiny market in itself, but US default ism that but okay, much of this trade occurs online. Yeah. No, I don’t think online is dominating as much as we think. Local fish shops are still a thing. They still have a large amount of the fish trade. Definitely. I’m not saying necessarily for dried goods, but actual living fish. People still like to go and see them in person. And marine I think actually is quite high up on that list. If you’re spending this sort of money on a single specimen, you prefer to see it before you buy it. Slightly different in the US because of bigger spaces. I mean, I can drive to I can get to, uh, for those of you who don’t know, I live in England and I can get to a good portion of England within two or three hours. I mean, I think I can do most of England bit stuck out at the ends with not great motorway systems. No, but for me, two or three hours, I’m pretty much most fish shops in the UK. So yeah, in England I apologize. Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales we were scraped for major US based e-commerce platform selling marine aquarium fish to determine the retail price and source, while capture aquaculture or both of thirteen families of ray finned marine fish. We supplemented this with ecological and economic trade data from FishBase and the International Union for Conservation of Nature IUCN. Across all platforms and thirteen popular fish taxonomic families, we found seven hundred and thirty four unique species for sale, eighty nine point two percent, six hundred and fifty five species of which was sourced exclusively from the wild. A total of forty five species were of conservation concern, twenty threatened species and twenty five additional species with decreasing population trends. Thirty eight of which were sourced solely from the wild. Retail price was significantly correlated with source body length, minimum occupied depth, and schooling behaviour. A further one hundred species for sale were not listed as being in the aquarium trade by FishBase or by the IUCN, indicating incomplete information on this fishery in two important databases for fifty eight species encompassing seventy one variants, with both wild caught and captive bred individuals for sale. Aquaculture fish were a mean twenty eight point one percent cheaper than their wild caught counterparts. Okay, so you look at that and you go, oh, terrible. Except then you dig into the numbers. My first criticism from those numbers in particular, they found seven hundred and thirty four unique species for sale, six hundred and fifty five were sourced exclusively from the wild. That doesn’t mean that ninety percent of individual fish are being sourced from the wild. I’m relatively confident that some species of fish, I’m thinking clownfish, for example, are far more popular than many of those thirty eight species that were of conservation concern and sourced solely from the wild. I mean, I’ve had a look at them. You want honesty? I’ve been admin on marine group for. Yeah, well, I started it so it won’t be the full ten years that tfc’s been. I’ve been running Tfc’s UK, but it’s pretty close. And many of those species I’d never seen, I’ve never seen in the trade. I had a quick Google. Most of them are either not sold in the UK or just by the odd site or two, and I suspect some of them are being sold. And I used to do this with my plants especially. We used to have a list of plants, and if you checked, it was like a one to two week lead on them. That was because if you ordered them, I then ordered them from the supplier because it just wasn’t worth me keeping them in all the time. The sales were that low on those numbers. So yes, I could source them for you, but I wasn’t holding on to them all the time. So we’re not talking about one to one. We’re not talking about each of those species being sold in similar amounts. We are talking about some of those species being massively popular than others. And due to the way the market works, those massively popular species are more likely to be captive bred or are so popular, so commonplace in the wild that captive breeding isn’t worth it. As soon as it becomes worth it, we as people tend to go out and try and learn what’s stopping us breeding them in captivity. And I’ll say again, clownfish, massively popular in the hobby, bred in large numbers. There’s very few being taken from the wild. Now, I’m not going to read the whole article again because it is thousands of words, but basically that the abstract fills it in. But in the discussion, there’s a couple of important things. So they talk about how priority should be placed on marine fish. Priority to breed in captivity. Aquaculture priority should be placed on marine fish with both high consumer demand and high extinction risks, and aquaculture efforts should be accompanied by behavioral interventions aimed at shifting consumer demand to sustainably sourced species. I am going to say every fish we purchase should be sustainably sourced, be that wild caught or be that captive bred, because there are problems that can crop up in both types. Such efforts should also not overlook the consequential impacts on the local community. Suppliers that are switched to aquaculture may entail. This is especially important when desirable species become increasingly difficult to source in the wild, because of overexploitation and reef degradation. There you go. Reef degradation. It’s not just, um, aquarists. Therefore, promoting a sustainable marine aquarium trade in wild fish May also be a viable option that is complementary to aquaculture. And then here you go. Additionally, the wild capture of fish for the marine aquarium trade can also drive socio economic resilience in many coastal communities in exporting countries, this practice is a major source of local income and employment, a shift entirely to aquaculture, which tends to operate as large scale enterprises in wealthier importing countries, could disrupt traditional livelihoods and concentrate production and economic returns outside the communities and countries most in need of support. These dynamics underscore the importance of balanced approaches that both protect marine biodiversity and safeguard socio economic benefits to vulnerable communities reliant on sustainable, small scale fisheries. This is the article that vice is quoting from, saying that Sacrist. Ninety percent of our fish are being ripped off coral reefs. And where the problem that article raises that very important point. I’ve said this a million times. I grew up sailing around the world. Um, absolutely magical. And one of the places I’m going to name, two of the places that I stayed at for an extended period of time. One was Barbados, and Barbados has fishermen that come out and capture reef fish. They tend to set their nets. These fish trap net things along the edges of the preserves to catch some of the fish. When I was there, I’m going to own up. This was in the eighties and 90s. It wasn’t anytime recently. The there were certain days when the fish were caught for the aquarium trade. Handled carefully, brought up nice and slowly. Taken ashore. Alive. Packaged up. Alive. Shipped out to this country alive. And we’ll talk about mortality in a second. On the days when they weren’t being caught for the aquarium trade, they were killed and then eaten. And we’ve got to remember this. This isn’t a Disney movie where Nemo escapes and goes back to the reef and lives happily ever after as a woman, because he would have been a female clownfish. No, sorry. Wrong way round. He was a boy. No, I’m getting that one the wrong way round. And his dad would have become his wife in that film. It’s a bit creepy, but anyway, it’s not Disney. There are alternatives to being captured and put in a tank. And for ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of eggs and fry that are hatched born, whatever that alternative is death by another fish, by pollution, and by overfishing for food. There are some wonderful places out there where it is lovely to see fish surviving, and I think we should do everything we can to protect them. But here’s the reality. As aquarists, we are doing more to protect them than every other vice reader going pretty much probably to prove me wrong. There’ll be someone on there who’s donated millions to this sort of thing, and this is where we get the issues in. Now, this data I’m going to now talk about is from the UK because I’m this is tropical Fishkeeping UK that I run. I have the data to hand for this sort of thing. But if you read the Owasa report Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association Straightforward, go on their website. You can find it. Just Google a water and wild caught fish. They have a section in their report called Trade Not Aid. And it’s a crucially important thing. The a lot of the places where this sort of thing is needed or is in place aren’t the rich nations that I’m privileged enough to live in. I used to for a brief period of time, I lived on an island in the middle of the Pacific called Tongareva or Penrhyn. It’s past the Cook Islands. It’s very, very remote. The bulk of the food is brought in by a ship. At the time it was a mail ship, the RMS Saint Helena. No. Sorry. Ms.. Nope. It’s gone again. I’m leaving in the mistakes today, and I’m making them. Ah, miss Saint Helena goes to Saint Helena. She’s long gone. Um, anyway, it was all brought in by ship, and at points one point when we arrived, they were so short on food that we divvied up the food we had on our boat. Um, and then had to get more when the ship came in. They at the time had pearl farming. It wasn’t sort of aquaculture. Pearl farming was done on the island in a large scale, and that was owned by a Japanese firm, um, that sort of rented part of the island for it. That was the main source of income to them. Yeah, a lot of the income went offshore because it was a big firm. It wasn’t sort of a local, um, run firm. Then disease wiped out not only the pearl farm to pearls, but a lot of the native pearls in the area. Now, the island has no major source of income as small amounts from women knitting hats, but they are now relying completely on subsidies from New Zealand, from Britain, from international bodies. They do grow a small amount of food on the island. But you’ve got to remember there isn’t soil on there. It is sandy coral atolls. There isn’t even enough depth to bury bodies out there. They’re put in raised, concreted over graves. It’s a harsh life. And you might say, well, why are they staying there then? Well, the Western world came along and changed things for them. Um, in the eighteenth century, Blackbirders took a huge portion of the island population as slaves. They went to Peru. Religion was brought onto the island and changed their entire. By religion, I mean Christianity. Sorry. It’s brought onto the island and changed their entire way of thinking and of life. We’ve been building around the islands. It’s the traditional Pacific Islander life that they used to have hundreds of years ago has completely gone. In fact, at least one man went out there to that area of the Cook Islands and married a large number of women, meaning that a lot of the people out there are descended from, um, I think some guy from Wigan, as you do. But what this means is their lives have changed, good or bad, you can discuss, but this sort of thing with the pearl farms, or with something like wild caught ornamental fish provides an income. And when you consider that the cost of the value of a fish eaten is about one percent of the value of a fish caught and exported for the aquarium trade, you can start to see that a small amount of fish can bring in a large amount of money, and the alternative for the locals is to eat them. Eat these large amounts of fish that you need to survive. And it’s all right for people online to sit there and go, oh, they shouldn’t be eating these endangered species. If your children are hungry, endangered species thoughts go out the window. If your children need food, let’s get them food. It’s important from that point of view. But it’s not just the people diving down and collecting the fish, it’s the people providing the diving equipment. It’s the people providing the boats. It’s the people servicing the boat engines, the money that all these ancillary occupations are bringing in, as well as the fish themselves, is going into the local families. It’s going into education, it’s going into healthcare. There’s all the stuff needed to take a fish from Polynesia, from the Philippines, from Hawaii, plastic bags, boxes. There’s the infrastructure needed to fly them out. You need an airport if you’re going to fly the fish out. And some places. Actually, the airport is subsidized by the planes that land to pick up fish. I’m not going to mention the island. It’s in the Indian Ocean. Um. Tiny island. And if you go in on a yacht, you moor up and between two of the coral reefs, there’s this. Oh. It’s gorgeous. You walk out to the edge, you jump in and you get blasted through quite quickly. And it is the most stunning coral environment you can actually see. Big groupers, tiny fish hanging out there. Absolutely amazing. You get spasms at the end. You walk back around, do it again. Fantastic. There was one guy who used to go out there again. This is in the nineties. And he used to. He had a license to catch a pair of these fish each year. He used to take them home and breed them. He paid many, many thousands for the right to catch a pair of these fish, to take them back and to breed them in captivity. Those thousands were being put straight back into that island economy. We as Yachty tourists. We weren’t putting much in. And there is now a sandals resort or something like that on the island. I don’t think it is sandals, but that sort of. And again, it’s quite enclosed. The money stays within the resorts. Yes. There are some jobs, um, from the tourism, but they still need these extra incomes. And you’ve also got things like, um, paying taxes, uh, all this sort of thing. Permits, paperwork, all that fun. It puts money into the local economy. Fish are actually really heavily regulated. I’m not saying there isn’t some illegal catching one hundred percent. There is illegal catching out there, but there’s going to be illegal catching going on out there. We can’t blame illegal industry for the illegal parts that happen. I drive a car, some people steal cars. That doesn’t mean that my driving a car legally should be in any way impacted like negatively impacted. Like they can’t stop me driving a car because someone sped and crashed or drove drunk. As long as I don’t speed and I don’t drive drunk, then I shouldn’t be impacted onerously by these other things. So when people are going to come in the comments going, but there’s illegal catching and all this sort of thing. Yes, there is, but instead of saying like, let’s wipe out the entire industry and leave the illegal catching, how about we work to stop the illegal catching? That’s the reality that we we need to look at. The other thing to consider is that if you are making money out of those coral reefs, if you are making money out of the rivers, if you are making money out of any form of nature conservation that side of things, you’re going to take better care of it. Are there any long term studies on this sort of thing or that like there is no harm? Project PR has been going for decades. Go and have a look at their stuff. They’ve found that there is no decrease in the target species that are being moved out, uh, from South America. They’ve found that. And like neon tetras okay, it’s cardinal tetras, that sort of headline project piaba. But it’s still close enough to make me go, oh, they really didn’t do their research collection from like Lake Malawi. We’re talking about hundreds of people from a single collecting station. Now, Malawi’s got its problems. It’s mostly due to the release of other fish into the area, the tilapia, the huge amounts of pollution problems that are happening there, part of the huge problem. And then I hate to point it out, but it sort of feels like whenever I see these articles and I’ve been out there, I’ve seen those massive fishing fleets that are out there. I’ve seen fishing fleets that were so big that they looked like a city from a yacht out there, about ninety million tons of fish is removed from the sea every year. Of those between seven and thirty three, according to Owusu’s numbers, million tons are just discarded. Your bycatch. About fifteen to twenty million seahorses alone are bycatch. Three million seahorses are caught and dried for the international trade. For Chinese medicine, just over three thousand are wild caught for the ornamental trade. Remember that number eighty to ninety million tons of fish removed from the oceans. Seventy tons. Eighty million to ninety million tons. Seventy tons is about what sold alive into the aquarium trade. And this source of. Feels like you’ve seen a plane crash. Like a plane dropped out of the sky. And there are dead people everywhere. And someone sitting there going, oh, there’s been littering. We’re focusing on something that a could be so hugely beneficial, and b even if it’s not. And that’s a horrible thing to say. And it is, it is. But even if it’s not, it is such a minor part of the whole. And I hate what aboutism, but I think this is somewhere where it may be useful. It’s such a tiny, tiny part of the whole problem that it’s almost dwarfed into insignificance. And again, it’s not all a problem. I said I’d mention mortality rates. Does this number thrown around? Two numbers thrown around one from about two thousand and one, which was, um, that seventy three percent of all fish die, I think. I can never remember whether they said in the first year or before they arrive at the shop, it was something ridiculous. And it’s very difficult to prove a negative on that. But that number is so ridiculous. I want you to imagine you have a business. And remember, the vast majority of fish are cheap. Let’s be honest, for something that’s been bred overseas, put on a plane, shipped over to the UK. Gone through all the paperwork there, all the customs import side of things shipped to a shop. Remember, they don’t get them for free. Okay, a large amount of the cost is in transport, but it’s a large cost. And can you imagine? You open the box and like three quarters of your product is destroyed. You’re not going to survive as a business more than like two orders, one order, two orders. It’s unsustainable. It’s frankly ridiculous. Other studies put the mortality rate at one to five percent. I can oh, there’s another number that’s thrown around by, um. It’s an animal rights charity. So we are an animal welfare group, and that means what we fight for is the best welfare, the outcomes for the animals. Animal rights are the ones that are looking at banning pet keeping, to be brutally honest. And this particular one that published data, they said that and they they’ve made it clear they want to ban pet keeping. They want to ban fish keeping. They said something like all reptiles, Nearly all reptiles die within the first year of life, to which all reptile keepers in the country looked at their animals that are fit and healthy and went really? And then they said that like ninety odd percent of fish die within the first year, most die before they reaching the shops. And then of those that’s left, most of those die. And it’s like the amount that survive is hardly worth talking about. I’ve got a twenty odd year old catfish sitting in my tank over there. Okay, he’s the extreme example, but no, most fish actually survive and thrive in tanks. There are problems. I’ll be the first to own up. There are problems. My entire day to day life is trying to solve some of those problems. But the fish still are thriving in many tanks. Now, here might be a controversial thing I’m going to say, and I’m going to say there are so many fish that we can provide a better life for in a fish tank than we can in the wild, and that flies in front of every romantic notion you have about the wild. Trust me, as someone who has seen it out there. It’s not as romantic as you might think. And if you are standing there going, no, we must. We must look at the wild more than anything else. I’m going to ask, when are you on the next plane to Africa to go and live in the jungles and survive like that? Let’s take no weapons. You don’t need clothing because you want to go back to the wild. You’re going to run around. You’re going to get bitten by mosquitoes. You’re going to be leeches all over you. You’re going to be hunted by things. You’re going to have to hunt your own food. It doesn’t sound that appealing to me. So let’s let’s have a bit of realism. I will also say there are many species, and I’ll say things like complex, complex cannot be given unless, well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tank that was suitable for a common black. That’s one of my examples. All I would say bristle nose plex, bristle nose plex. I can provide you a life far in advance of what would be in the wild many, many species of gouramis in places where pollution is such an issue. I mean, our standard, um, uh, the better fish, um, beta, beta, whatever you pronounce it, beta, whatever you pronounce it as Siamese fighting fish because no one argues how that one’s pronounced. And then normal standard, we’re not one hundred percent sure how they’re doing in the wild. There are some inklings that they may be extinct in the wild. I don’t think it’s quite that bad, but it is bad for them. Put them in a reasonable sized tank with plenty of enrichment, with the right waters, with some plants for them to survive in, and they can absolutely thrive. I know of people who’ve had theirs nearly a decade, some slightly longer. Okay, again, that’s the extreme. Some die young. I think that’s because they’re raised with high nitrates. But ignore me for that one. This is the reality. We can provide a wonderful home for them in captivity. And if we’re not, we need to deal with those problems. If what you’re saying like no fish are generally put in two smaller tanks. So let’s start campaigning for the right fish to be in the hobby and for tanks to be bigger. I’m going to hear people going, yeah, well, tanks can’t really be provided for in most tanks. Yeah. So let’s deal with tanks being put in tanks that are unsuitable, not, say every single fish has to be considered unsuitable for a tank. Even the study shows problems in this sort of thing. And I think there’ll be some people out there, quite rightly, going, yeah, what about things like cyanide fishing for like wild capture? So cyanide fishing was literally where they used to poison the reefs. Everything would bob to the surface. You could just pick it up and it killed the coral. It was a big problem. So the study mentions that the references are date from twenty fourteen, twenty twelve and two thousand and one. As a former university lecturer, I would be really pulling that one apart. If you can’t find a reference to it in the last ten years, then you ain’t going to reference it in a PhD study unless it’s like relevant to that. So we’re like, for example, um, last time I was working on my PhD, I was looking at how there was a brief bit on how things had changed over the years. So yeah, I had to look at older references for that. Um, that was the reason. Other than that, you tend to need to look at stuff that’s more modern. Does cyanide fishing go on? I suspect so, but testing at our end. So at the aquarium end now, cyanide fishing can be tested for because otherwise you’re buying a sick fish. So the retailers don’t want it anymore because they might be selling a fish where the customer comes back and says, I want my money back. It died too soon. So that sort of thing is being worked on. But even like I say, the study was problematic and then vice is reporting on it was even more problematic. But and this is a big, big problem. The average person is seeing that and you go, well, the average person doesn’t keep fish, so who cares because the average person is influencing the government, because politicians, politicians are elected to listen to their to the people who elected them. And if enough people have elected them, have come to them and gone, this is a problem. They will do something about it. And I’ll give you an example, uh, regulating of rescues. So there’s been some really bad cases in the UK where dog and cat rescues have been found to be hoarding problems. There is now a moved for a bill to go through Parliament to regulate rescues. The problem was seen. People kicked off online about it. Enough. A bill is being passed. Imagine if that becomes fishkeeping. Imagine if the I watch Finding Nemo and think that’s reality. Crowd get together and starts saying no. We really do want to see wild caught fish banned from coming into the UK. And I hate to say I’m not being ridiculous because this is a real, real problem that we might be facing. We’re wild caught fish can’t be imported into the UK because because of no decent reasons. And here’s another problem I’m going to raise. Last problem with all this seemly the fact that we occasionally collect fish that are at risk, despite the fact that millions of pounds and dollars are being put back into economies, despite the fact that this can provide incomes, despite the fact this provides education opportunities, despite the fact that many of the coral breeding projects are being done by, if not aquarists, studies funded by aquarists. Despite the fact that many of the breeding successes that zoos are having are built on the back of aquarists breeding successes. Despite the fact that all this, we are still being blamed. Seemingly, it’s my fault because I own neon tetras that a I don’t right now, but I’m looking at a neon tetra project. That’s for a future thing. But anyway, um, it’s my fault that, uh, that the Great Barrier Reef is dissolving. Not that there’s recently been a thing that said we have reached a tipping point in climate change. Ocean acidification is so bad now that coral reefs may not recover. We may have reached that point where coral reefs are doomed. And when the reefs go, all those reef fish are going with them. But that’s not being addressed. Vice didn’t publish an article saying coral reefs really need our help and therefore we need funding being put into this. We need large scale amounts of money being put in to try and protect the reefs. We need a rebreeding projects to go on. We need scientists that are interested in this. Where can we get the money from? Oh, I know the people who are quite willing to pay two and three hundred pounds for a single fish. That’s where we can get some of the money from. No, they didn’t say any of that. They said aquarium keepers. You are accidentally killing coral reefs. It’s utterly ridiculous. What are the risks to fish? Overfishing. Yeah, and it’s not us. Some limited cases, it has been us. I’ll admit that there have been some cases where a fish was discovered, and next thing you know, it was being the wild population was being absolutely decimated. I don’t actually think any of those is one hundred percent to blame on across, but I think in a couple of cases we did have a hand in it and I think we were wrong. I think those should have been stopped. I think anybody who knew that these were being stripped from the wild in unsustainable numbers and still bought them is wrong. Sorry, sorry, that was you. But I’ll stand by that one. But food fishing. Have you ever seen a bottom trawl nets? When the sea. The ocean floor. Once the trawlers gone over where they’ve dragged the nets across the floor and ripped up everything in its path. Everything. It looks like a scene. Like something’s come down and taken like a child’s net. A giant child’s net has just scooped everything across the floor. Or followed a trawler where there is hundreds of dead fish being thrown over because they were bycatch and they can’t land them for whatever reason. That’s the overfishing problem we’ve got. What about every time a ship drags its anchor? What about every time? Even if it doesn’t drag its anchor, the act of anchoring means that you’ve got chain laying across the floor. And as they swing round with the wind, they drag across the bottom. We’re not discussing that. We’re not discussing the fact that the Great Barrier Reef, one of our our greatest reefs on this planet, one of the wonders of the world, is a major shipping channel. I should know, being their dive. They’re seeing some of the problems. Got bit by a spider and spent three days hallucinating. That wasn’t fun. Pollution is a huge, major problem. Um, if you want to protect Amazon, the Amazon fish, and you’re thinking, oh, I can’t buy wild fish because that’s damaging the Amazon, I really hope you’re not having anything with gold in it, like your mobile phone, because gold mining and mineral mining and rare earth mineral mining is more of a problem, far more of a problem than the sustainable fishing that goes on in many places in South America. And as mentioned, climate change and ocean acidification. Deforestation is a huge problem in some areas because it leads to more runoff that leads to more nutrients in the water, which leads to more algae, which leads to less oxygen, which leads to dead fish. But let’s also finish on a real positive. Some of those projects I’ve seen around the world, some where what they do is they take local, like they take the fish, um, at certain periods of the year when you know that the females are holding or if it’s, um, group spawning about the right time of year. And then they put them safely in nets on the side of the riverbanks or lakes or whatever it is. Um, and then they allow them to breed in there. They then release the adults. Unless the adults are needed to take care of them, they bring them on, and then a small percentage of those are sold. They go into the aquarium trade and a large percentage of them are released. So many of those industries have reintroduced thousands of species back into the wild. They were teetering on the brink of being a problem, and now they’re booming. And these are the great projects that you can see out there. Um, Amazon yellow headed river turtle being some real success of those. Some of that success has been funded by some of them going into captivity. Bad example for turtles because those sods get huge. But you know, there’s still real positive out there for the species out there. And if you want to have a look at more stuff like this, look up things like project Piaba. Um, have a look at the work Chester Zoo’s doing. Chester Zoo is doing a pile of work on various projects around the world. Have a look at the, uh, the nuns that are raising axolotls. It’s actually a closely related species, but, you know, it’s still great work. Um, have a look at some of the projects being funded for growing corals. Uh, some of those are absolutely amazing. Things are just booming on on that side of things. Have a look at all the, uh, marine, um, conservation areas that are being set up all around the world, everywhere from the UK to various parts of the Caribbean, all over the world on that sort of thing. Have a look for those good news stories, because there are so many out there and so many of them are great. Yeah, I got annoyed at that vice article. But you know what? On the whole, as part of this industry, I think we’re doing a damn good job for a lot of things. And yeah, we’ve got problems. I’ll be the first to say that. I’ll be the first to leave recording this podcast, and I’m going to jump onto one of the socials and someone’s going to have a problem. And part of me is going to go. Us. And surely we’re past this now. But I was at a meeting a few weeks ago and I got talking to someone, and he mentioned things that I’ve been campaigning about for years. And he said to me something along the lines of, why are you still campaigning? That’s sorted now. And I thought to myself, it’s not sorted, but it’s getting a lot better. So yeah, thank you so much for listening to me rant on and ramble and wander around the world on various things. Um, don’t worry about going to that vice article and leaving them a thing because they are getting slaughtered in the comments. It’s okay. It’s driving their engagements. It’s annoying. But if you could, um, if you’ve got people who might like to listen to me rant and ramble, please share this. Um, we’ve always been a tiny little podcast. I think we need to sort of start spreading our wings and trying to, um, be listened to by more people. So please, please, please, if you’ve got friends who like this sort of thing, please share. Please subscribe. Like whatever it is, follow follow on iPod on Apple. I know that one. Um, because this is going to be I’m going to promise to get one out every week for as long as I possibly can, but there will also be rants in between. So I’m going to start next week with the sensible one of what are your parameters? Because that is the thing that my phone I put a w in and my phone just goes, what are your parameters as the next few words? Because I say it that often and I’d like to explain why. Why it’s a problem, why these are probably the most important thing you have to learn as a fish keeper. And if you’re going, well, I already know what my parameters are. I already understand that one. We’re going to dive into the science a little bit, just so that you can learn a little bit more. For example, did you know that nitrites are a problem depending on what your pH is? Anyway, thank you so much for listening and I will speak to you next time.
