Let’s get real about Wild Caught
Wild caught animals have the potential to be a leading conservation tool, they also have the ability to be a cause for the decimation of ecosystems, and seriously damage the hobby. We as the drivers of this trade need to start taking emotion out of the conversation and start looking at the real issues.
A recent paper published in Communication Biology looks at the international trade in arachnids, and there were some real negatives, ones that science websites and pages have been pulling out to write such headlines as “Scientists Have Exposed a ‘Hidden’ Global Arachnid Trade, And It Has Dire Consequences” the original paper “Searching the web builds fuller picture of arachnid trade” can be found here https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03374-0
Whilst the title may have aimed to be amusing the paper itself does not make for positive reading, statements such as “….(the) wildlife trade is now often acknowledged to be a major driver of global biodiversity losses,” and “Existing regulations in most countries do not provide sufficient safeguards for most species and perpetuate an idea that “legal trade is sustainable,” when there are currently insufficient data to link the two.”
But this is about spiders mostly, and to be honest the report reads like so many written by those fighting to have the trade-in wild-caught animals stopped. Why should we care?
Because 3/4 of what was written about this is relevant to fish, and fish are more attractive to a lot of people than spiders, already some larger media sources are running with the story, and keepers are being shown in a very bad light. A follow up story about the same thing in fish keeping is not going to shine a great light on the hobby.
So what are the issues, and what are the positives.
Let’s hit the positives first.
- Fish, and spiders, are being traded for things such as food, and that requires a much larger volume than for pets. We as pet keepers will pay more for a small fish in some cases than the food market will pay for a whole larger food fish. This trade means that there is a value in protecting ecosystems. Project Piaba has shown that in areas where the trade goes on in a sustainable manner fish stocks are not declining at all.
- This can provide an income to areas where there may not be many other options, as well as protecting fish stocks and the ecosystems they exist in, they can provide communities with a source of sustainable income.
- In areas where habitat loss is increasing fish in captivity may be the difference between extinct in the wild and just plain old extinct. Now I’m going to pause here and go into a bit more depth, and in some ways, this is trite rubbish that is trotted out, for 99% of the fish in our tanks there is no practical way for them to ever be reintroduced into the wild. Often when they were imported they were mislabeled, it may be what we thought was a single species turned out to be a complex of species. We may well have allowed hybridisation, and there is a real risk of diseases and parasites in our tanks that these fish have been exposed to. Lastly, if they are true conservation species then we are talking about a few specialist keepers and zoos alone that can breed them for return to the wild.
Okay, so I’ve destroyed my own argument. No, because things have changed in conservation science, DNA typing, for both species and diseases can allow us to pinpoint the exact species a fish is and can screen for diseases. This is not cheap, but it is possible, and in TFKUK alone there is probably more tank space than all the zoos and aquaria in the country combined. Not all the keepers will want to undertake training and devote the space to breeding and raising a rare species, that is often an LBJ, little brown job, in other words, a boring fish that you would probably walk straight past, but many do, and that sort of citizen science can be the difference for many species.
Add to that the knowledge and the experience keepers represent and there is a lot we can offer.
Is the picture this rosy? Sustainable income and the ability to offer thousands of hours and tanks to conservation. No far from it, in part, because hobbyist keepers and zoos have started to move apart. As zoos have started to become more scientific and zookeepers needing more qualifications than some medical specialists, they have started to disagree with many practices. For their part hobbyist keepers who may devote a lifetime of study to a single species and its natural environment, spending thousands to create inclosures with native plants, running thousands of litres of water to grow on fry, travelling all over the world to talk to other hobbyists about their specialist species, they may see the more generalist zookeepers as not being as knowledgable as themselves. If we want to make the idea of conservation in our fish tanks a genuine success for the many, rather than the few, this trend needs to be reversed, with us keepers striving to learn more, and become more useful to conservation, and zoos and other conservation drivers allowing us keepers to be useful.
Collection is also not as pretty a picture around the world. Many species are collected by poisoning the water, collecting the commercial fish as they rise to the surface, and leaving the rest to die. Some species have been over-collected. Some species are only discovered once they turn up in the hobby, you only have to look at the number of species named after collectors to give you an idea of the scale. L numbers for plecs, DW numbers for Apistogramma and C numbers for cory, all to allow identification before they are officially recognised and named. But it is difficult to monitor the trade in an undescribed species. Fish have been collected in one area and moved to a more convenient stream or lake to allow them to be collected again at the right time. There are stories of fish being brought back to the UK in hand luggage.
Is this a huge threat to fish populations? In most cases no, far from it. Pollution forms a major issue around the world. Sewage from humans and farm animals, mines discharging dangerous chemicals into the water, run off from farming, oil spills, and many more issues. Deforestation leading to a change in the land, the temperature of the water, and even the rainfall patterns. The introduction of larger fish for food, or for sport fishing. Invasive species, the protection of some animals over others, leading to overpopulation, and causing pressures on food webs, the list is depressingly long.
Add to that farming fish isn’t always better, there are great farms and there are bad farms. But that is a discussion for another time.
But here is the kicker, we are going to lose huge parts of the hobby. Because there are bodies that are publishing articles about how keepers on sites are sending each other rare spiders in the post. Buying tens, sometimes hundreds, collecting them as others would collect stamps. How sometimes the only examples are in cages in someone’s spare bedroom, and until more are found in the wild, the numbers suggest they have all been stripped out of the wild. They will use emotive language, and they will win hearts, minds and votes.
We will instead argue about keeping red-tailed cats, and goldfish in small tanks. We will be divided because some of us do lots of water changes and others don’t, and whilst we argue among ourselves the laws will be changed, and the hobby made smaller.
Instead, we need to start showing how great the hobby can be, working with importers, businesses and trade bodies to develop systems allowing us to trace where our fish have come from. We need to treat them like the long-lived and intelligent pets they are. Not a temporary collection of pretty things. You need to know where your fish have come from, and to know that it was a sustainable source. Wild-caught or farmed.
Support us as well if you can, because there are a lot of voices against our hobby. We are just one for the hobby.
