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  #26  
Old 05/21/2007, 11:09 AM
Genral72 Genral72 is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by jglackin
Paul,


Aquaculture is something that may or may not help. I was reading recently, for every kilo of farm raised salmon, shrimp, or other carnivorous fish, it requires 1.8 kilos of fish from the sea. So, while we can get warm and fuzzy that the fish are farm raised, the ecological impacts are still there. They still need to trawl for bait fish to feed that salmon and the shrimp. Also, the pollution from these aqua farms is significant.
You do have to realize that within the ocean it would take more than 1.8 kilos from the ocean. 1.8 kilos is actually pretty good. After all you have to figure that in the end it would take at least 2.8 Kilos from the ocean if all our fish were caught from the ocean.
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  #27  
Old 05/21/2007, 11:36 AM
jglackin jglackin is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by Genral72
You do have to realize that within the ocean it would take more than 1.8 kilos from the ocean. 1.8 kilos is actually pretty good. After all you have to figure that in the end it would take at least 2.8 Kilos from the ocean if all our fish were caught from the ocean.
I am sorry, I am not getting your logic. Are you saying that the shrimp and salmon would be taking fish from the ocean anyway, so, if we are taking only 1.8 kilos of fish to grow 1 kilo of salmon or shrimp, we are doing good?

A couple of things:

1. Salmon and shrimp don't trawl for their food and destroy large swaths of the seabed, seahorses, sand dollars, etc.

2. Shrimp don't live off of captured fish in the wild. They eat dead fish, plankton, and etc. Scooping up bait fish to feed them is man's answer to feeding them when farm raising them.
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  #28  
Old 06/06/2007, 06:04 PM
PRINCE_NAMOR PRINCE_NAMOR is offline
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Re: The ecological impacts of our addiction

Quote:
Originally posted by jglackin
I will not eat animal products. I will consume, leather shoes, etc., but I keep the consumption to a bare minimum.
How do they taste? do you prefer Nike or Reebok?......jk
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  #29  
Old 06/06/2007, 06:09 PM
jglackin jglackin is offline
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Good one
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  #30  
Old 06/06/2007, 06:25 PM
PRINCE_NAMOR PRINCE_NAMOR is offline
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Seriously though, I just watched world news tonight about the cleanup off the coast of Florida. Seems like some genious decided tires would make a good artificial reef and they dumped over 2 million tires into the ocean. Those tires are now bumping into the natural reefs breaking them apart. I think we need solutions, but we should think them out very well.
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  #31  
Old 06/06/2007, 06:41 PM
PRINCE_NAMOR PRINCE_NAMOR is offline
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genious I meant genius, DUHHH! lol
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  #32  
Old 06/28/2007, 10:58 PM
loosecannon loosecannon is offline
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the aquarium hobby is a sound and worthwhile pursuit, educational not only for us but for the many people who visit and view our reef`s. For several hundred thousand individuals , the aquarium trade is a livelihood- a way to make a living by catching,farming,or trading aquarium organisms. The aquatic trade is particularly important as a source of income in many third world countries, where whole local communities can be dependent on the capture or aquaculture of ornamental fishes and invertebrates. The # of people in Sri Lanka alone involved in the export of reef animals is over 50,000. The FAO reported that the export value of ornamental fishes and invertebrates in 1996 a lone was more than $200,000,000 bucks U.S. . In excess of 60 % of that some $130,000,000 , wentback into the economies of this countries. example in 1994, the Maldives exported less than 250 kg. of ornamental fishes to the United Kingdom and received , in terms of net weight of fish, more than $496,000 per ton. In contrast, food fish harvested from the in the Seychelles was exported at a value of just$6,000 per ton. Animals suce as Tridacan spp. that were nearly wiped out in many areas by overcollection for the asian food trade are now being propagated by many tropical island nations. Coral farms that produce small , started colonies of numerous species are also appearing in many place in the world. Some of these farms are even involved in projects to restock reefs that have been damaged by bleaching events and other natural or man made disasters. Beyond supporting global eforts to build a sustainable aquarium trade, there are alos immediate actions we can take on a more personal level.
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  #33  
Old 06/30/2007, 04:35 PM
HPD Turbo HPD Turbo is offline
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My part on preserving the natural wild is not purschase any live stock, I only adopt them from friend, or from people in the hobby in my country.
I wait a lot when I want something. But you can be surpriced how much people want to get rid of an animal/invert.

Please search before buying.
For every creature that we get and other one is dead.
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  #34  
Old 07/02/2007, 09:40 AM
jglackin jglackin is offline
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Donde vivas en Mexico?
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  #35  
Old 07/02/2007, 10:59 AM
HPD Turbo HPD Turbo is offline
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En Puebla.
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  #36  
Old 07/08/2007, 10:10 AM
greenbean36191 greenbean36191 is offline
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Quote:
I am sorry, I am not getting your logic. Are you saying that the shrimp and salmon would be taking fish from the ocean anyway, so, if we are taking only 1.8 kilos of fish to grow 1 kilo of salmon or shrimp, we are doing good?
Yes, that's doing good. You're talking about a 10-12 kilos of fish being eaten for each kilo an animal puts on in the wild. In captivity you're looking at about 1-3 kilos of food (not fish) per kilo of growth. No more than 40% of that food is fishmeal (usually much less, and now often completely replaced by soy protein). That fishmeal is made up waste from fish processing and menhaden, which isn't captured by bottom trawlers, has extremely low bycatch rates, and ATM is being harvested sustainably.

Chickens and cattle eat about 25% more fish per lb of growth than farmed fish do and are by far the leading consumers of fishmeal.
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Last edited by greenbean36191; 07/08/2007 at 10:30 AM.
  #37  
Old 07/08/2007, 10:29 AM
greenbean36191 greenbean36191 is offline
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Quote:
What affect do you think billions of gallons of phosphate rich, heavily polluted water being pumped into the Keys every day is having on the corals?
The Keys have been right on the edge for their entire history, which has more to do with the topography of Florida Bay than the state of the water coming from the Everglades. The idea that much of the pollution from the Glades is making it out to the reefs isn't very well supported. Working to clean up the water running into the swamp is a great idea of course, but it's not likely to have much, if any, effect on the health of the reefs.

Quote:
Was my comment about repopulating a reef tongue in cheek,absolutly not.
The only way to make it work is to address the underlying problems that killed the corals off in the first place. In the Caribbean that's primarily been increasing temps and the diseases associated with that.

Quote:
and no aquaculture at present is CERTAINLY NOT sustainable, i can happily provide evidence
That's a pretty broad brush. There certainly are aquaculture operations that aren't done sustainably, such as Asian shrimp farming and inshore salmon farming, but there are also plenty that are completely sustainable. Oysters, giant clams, Trochus, shrimp, cobia, and too many others to list are all being done sustainably.
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  #38  
Old 07/08/2007, 11:39 AM
jglackin jglackin is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by greenbean36191
The idea that much of the pollution from the Glades is making it out to the reefs isn't very well supported.
Well, just like man-made global warming, there are those that are behind it and there are those that deny it exists. In the case of the Everglades, the case is in the courts and it is also in Congress. There is much talk about the pollution from the Everglades making it to the reefs.
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  #39  
Old 07/08/2007, 05:10 PM
greenbean36191 greenbean36191 is offline
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The bodies of evidence supporting the impact of Everglades runoff and anthropogenic warming are in totally different leagues.

People have been writing about the historically poor development of the Keys reefs and how they shouldn't be used as canaries for the rest of the Carribean reefs longer than runoff from the Glades has been a problem. You see the same patterns of poor development and decline in parts of the Bahamas where there isn't the issue of runoff, but the bottom topography is similar. When people have looked for the nutrients from the Glades on the reefs they haven't found them except in short, rare pulses after extremely heavy rains. Those types of nutrient pulses are common throughout the Caribbean due to entirely natural causes, and generally don't cause long term problems. There is nothing about the FL case that seems to make it special. There are nutrient problems in some areas of the Keys, but they're mainly due to local sources, not the Everglades.

I can guarantee you that if you were to ask the president of the International Society for Reef Studies, which is devoted to reef conservation, he would tell you that trying to make a difference on the reefs by fixing the Everglades is a feel-good measure. There are plenty of man-made problems in the Keys, but there is very little evidence showing Glades runoff is one of them.
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  #40  
Old 07/09/2007, 02:46 AM
loosecannon loosecannon is offline
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Greenbean36191: The everglades mangroves and reefs are all counected! P.S. those pepole in fl. should all go back to Long Island!
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  #41  
Old 07/09/2007, 11:27 AM
greenbean36191 greenbean36191 is offline
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I'm familiar with how that works. The fact that there is a connection doesn't mean anything about where the nutrients end up though. The fact that the water doesn't just flow straight from the Everglades onto the reefs is a huge part of why the nutrients aren't getting there. They have to pass through miles of mangroves and sea grass before they ever get to the reefs. Even in areas of the keys that have sewage wells that percolate straight out to the reefs the water is back to oligotrophic levels within about 500 yards of the source and even there, the main source of P is upwelling from offshore, not the sewage. Everglades pollution making it out to the reefs in the Keys in significant amounts still remains to be demonstrated.

Just take a look at where the actual reefs are in the Keys. Notice that the reefs never formed on the bay side of the islands or very extensively in the middle keys where there are lots of large passes for bay water to come through. That's because that water has always been bad news for the reefs. For the last 5,000 years since the reefs formed they've been periodically knocked back by inimical water from the bay without any help from pollution. They only formed where they were sheltered from the water in the first place. You see the same pattern on Andros Island in the Bahamas.

The loss of the reefs in the Keys doesn't seem to have any historical precedence, and man-made causes are definitely contributing. However, even though runoff from the Glades seems like a common sense cause, things generally aren't that simple. It makes a good story, but it's hard to make a compelling case for it based on the real-world research.
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  #42  
Old 07/19/2007, 08:43 PM
Boomstick Boomstick is offline
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This is a great question - IMHO it is a double edged sword, for a few reasons:
Even if you go - captive bread, frag only - you are buying consumables that are adding to pollution, ecological destruction etc

on the flip side, if no one did anything, species may be lost forever and people otherwise ignorant (like i was) would never know what they are destroying.

there is more to the question than just fish and corals - i.e energy consumption is huge!

so here is my take:

be as responsible as possible, support aquaculture, frag and share, educate those that don’t know IF THEY ASK, if not, post in places like this to give an opinion, not a lecture - in my experience no-one likes a lecture. Support green energy, i pay a monthly fee to my power company to support green energy. And finally, don’t support LFS that stock exotic, rare species, it all starts with grass roots movement - no one is perfect, and we are not right all the time, but so long as you do things with the best intentions and try, then it will all turn out in the wash.

I also think that maybe we should all donate our ashes to artificial reefs (Google it) - and support a reef restoration project somewhere, anyone who knows some good ones - post them
here.
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  #43  
Old 08/11/2007, 09:19 AM
Elliott Elliott is offline
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does anyone have an idea what percentage of livestock in our tanks are aquacultured?
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  #44  
Old 08/15/2007, 12:45 PM
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don't know about percentage, but i must say that i made a decision to only acquire tank-bred animals and corals, so if i believe my fellow reefers and LFS, everything i have is tank bred! of course with the exception of the live rock, but that's broken up from storms and such......i'm told!
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  #45  
Old 08/19/2007, 01:13 AM
Oceandevil Oceandevil is offline
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This is part of our larger issue: Humanity has no long term plan for its impact on the earth. We only get bigger every year. Something has to give.
  #46  
Old 08/20/2007, 09:11 AM
BrianPlankis BrianPlankis is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by Elliott
does anyone have an idea what percentage of livestock in our tanks are aquacultured?
The best estimate I've seen is 1-10% aquacultured for both fish and coral. I can't remember the name of the report right now, but it was from 2003. However, those numbers are based on import/export numbers and do not include fragging by local hobbyists. There is currently another large report in peer review right now that says the coral numbers are up around 15% now with the large mariculture operations producing now (Walt Smith?).

I would GUESS that fragging adds another 5-10% of aquacultured onto the corals, but there is no good way to track fragging.

Regardless of fragging, aquaculture is rising, but is still a very low percentage of the animals in our tanks. A great many of the fish and mobile invertebrates in our tanks are still 100% wild caught as we know nothing, or next to nothing, about their reproduction.

Brian
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  #47  
Old 08/20/2007, 09:24 AM
Elliott Elliott is offline
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thank you Brian, very good to know. I hope the percentage of aquacultured livestock continues to grow and eventually surpasses that caught from the wild.
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  #48  
Old 08/20/2007, 10:13 AM
Wolverine Wolverine is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by AJtheReefer
I think the most important contribution of our hobby is the ecological awareness gained by the hobbyist. And hopefully this makes us more responsible with the environment, especially outside the sea.

I don't think this hobby is environment friendly, nor I think it would ever be. I have accepted this.

With that said, we can minimize the impact. By trading frags, buying tank raised stock, etc.
I agree completely with all these points. It's impossible to pretend that this is a green hobby. How much energy do you put into your system, pumps, lighting, etc?
How much water do you waste when you make RO water? Hopefully you have it going into a greywater system or into a clothes or dishwasher.
How much energy goes into transporting those animals from the pacific islands to your home in the middle of the US?

And those questions don't even address the environmental impacts at the level of the reef itself.

I definitely agree that ecological and environmental awareness are definitely the biggest benefits of the hobby, along with education of others who come over and are interested in what you have.

On the positive side, there is a school of thought that in some areas, where they're working to use sustainable reef fish collecting practices, they've realized that the reef is worth more healthy than dead, and so try to mininmize commercial fishing and development, which are both more damaging than our hobby. If the hobby goes away, so does any reason to continue to protect those reefs.

Aquaculturing is definitely the way we have to go longterm. I think there is a lot available aquacultured. In our current tanks, everything is aquacultured/tank-raised except about 5# of LR that we seeded with (and you could easily argue that this is still not enough).

One problem is to get the kind of people who aren't reading threads in Responsible Reefkeeping to jump onto the aquaculture bandwagon. For almost everyone, if you ask them if, all other things being equal, they would rather have wild-caught or aquacultured, they'll choose the latter. If you ask them if they'd be willing to pay more for aquaculture, fewer, but still most people say yes. But then they get to the store, and when it comes down to it, most people end up going with the cheaper option. I've seen people pass by a tank of locally raised perculas to get the cheaper wild-caught ones in the next tank. The people at the LFS say this happens all the time. They'll often go through all of their WC ones before people will by the locally raised ones. Until you get that attitude to shift (and I think it is very, very slowly shifting), this hobby will continue to do significant damage to the wild ecosystems.

Dave
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  #49  
Old 08/20/2007, 10:53 AM
Elliott Elliott is offline
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Wolverine: yes, there is no doubt this hobby falls way short of being "green" and probably always will. However the degree to which it falls short can be improved upon, I think significantly. Successful reefkeeping requires a greater understanding from the Hobbyist and hopefully with that will come a greater appreciation of this delicate resource. Judging by the growth of RC lately it appears a greater number of Hobbyist's are eager to learn more.
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  #50  
Old 08/20/2007, 01:59 PM
BrianPlankis BrianPlankis is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by Elliott
Wolverine: yes, there is no doubt this hobby falls way short of being "green" and probably always will. However the degree to which it falls short can be improved upon, I think significantly. Successful reefkeeping requires a greater understanding from the Hobbyist and hopefully with that will come a greater appreciation of this delicate resource. Judging by the growth of RC lately it appears a greater number of Hobbyist's are eager to learn more.
There are definitely a number of ways the hobby can be a lot more green, many of which have already been discussed in this forum.

One of the biggest problems in this hobby is that the average hobbyist only stays in the hobby about a year and rarely goes online. It is this group of hobbyists that buys just about anything and doesn't take the time to read up on how to do things properly. They don't understand aquaculture is important and that people can even raise things in captivity. A large percentage of the mortality of wild caught animals is this uniformed group of hobbyists that want a "pet Nemo" that give up when everything in their tanks "mysteriously" dies. Getting this rapidly overturning group of people educated about the declining health of coral reefs is one of the biggest challenges to slowing the damage from the hobby.

Not saying this is the biggest problem, there are many things many groups of people can do, but this problem is not mentioned as often.

Brian
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