At a recent meeting of the Southern California Marine Aquarium Society one of the members piped up, tongue-in-cheekily, “Does anyone keep fish anymore?” The obvious answer is yes.
You see, corals and ornamental marine reef fish do not need to be mutually exclusive (albeit many enthusiasts keep fish without corals and vice versa). Each group can complement the other. Many long-time aquarists cut their teeth on fish, later added corals to their aquariumkeeping portfolios and now keep both. The truth is we love marine fish. Pick your favorite. Two of my favorites are gobies as their heads go up and down like Whac-a-Moles and cardinalfish pacing the aquarium in the tight military precision of a shoal.
The 2009 Marine Fish and Reef USA has something for everyone, but many of the articles are about fish. And none is more important than Tim Hayes’ article “Save the Hobby With Captive Breeding” on page 110. According to Hayes’ article, of the 1,500 marine species in the hobby, less than 100 are captive bred with regularity.
Given the escalating environmental degradation of the world’s oceans and the impact it is having on the corals and fish we import into our aquariums, it’s only a matter of time before the marine aquarium hobby is blocked from keeping many of these same fish and corals by regulatory measures issued from near and afar.
If in 20 years we want to guarantee ourselves more than 100 species in the hobby, the hobbyist community must earnestly begin captive breeding marine species. And if we do this, we’ll save our wonderful hobby, a lot of cool fish and invertebrates, and our tanks — these arks of life — may even serve to reintroduce some species into the oceans from whence they came, once those oceans begin to right themselves.