Are All Our Fish Captive Bred?

[noodles]

Just a thought, but what percentage of fish in our local fish shops are captive bred? It scares me to think about the damage that we could be doing to native fish stocks by the sheer scale of fish sales these days. I know a lot of common fish, neons, angels etc, must be captive bred, but what about the more tricky to breed fish? How do commercial fish farms get their fish to breed successfully?

Even if all fish are commercially bred, I am guessing a lot of these are from fish farms abroad? If so how do they all get to our shops and what sort of death rate occurs?

Not meaning to dampen the christmas spirit with this one, but I hate the idea that whenever I go to my local fish shop and see people spending a fiver on 5 fish that I know are quite possibly going to die within the next month due to not being cared for, what does this actually cost in terms of fish? Even my cheapest fish I hate to see in any sort of distress as they all need looking after.

Also in the past I have always been put off of saltwater fish due to the thought that these were largely all wild caught fish, which I don't really agree with. Is this still the case?

Don't get me wrong, I love keeping fish, but if it took a chain of 5 fish being caught in the wild (or even captive bred abroad), to 3 surviving the journey to the fish shop, to 1 dying in the shop, and 1 being bought by someone who is going to neglect it, and leaving me with 1 fish to look after, I am not sure I want to keep fish!

 

[Kazuya73]

Diddo Noodles Same thing been on my mind 4 awhile!But then it's the same thing when U see all those Betta's stuck in a tiny plastic cups with blue water sitting on the shelves and then hearing the "fish guy" tell someone that he will live just fine in there!!!But what can U do?I've personally spent a lot of $$ with those same LFS because they have what I need,when I need it 4 a good price(Chemical's,Food,ect.).How do you not support those guy's without paying through the nose 4 things U need plus shipping!?

 

[eschaton]

From my understanding, it depends on the species.

Always tank bred:
Livebearers
Most Ciclids
Zebra Danios
White Cloud Mountain Minnows (almost extinct in the wild)
Cherry Shrimp
Snails of all sorts

Sometimes tank bred:
Neon Tetras
Plecos
Corys (rarer species more likely to be wild-caught)

Always (or almost always) wild-caught:
Ghost Knifes
Ottos
Amano Shrimp
Cardinal Tetras
Pygmy Rasboras and the like.
Just about every saltwater fish (main exceptions some clowns and gobies)

 

[noodles]

From my understanding, it depends on the species.

Always tank bred:
Livebearers
Most Ciclids
Zebra Danios
White Cloud Mountain Minnows (almost extinct in the wild)
Cherry Shrimp
Snails of all sorts

Sometimes tank bred:
Neon Tetras
Plecos
Corys (rarer species more likely to be wild-caught)

Always (or almost always) wild-caught:
Ghost Knifes
Ottos
Amano Shrimp
Cardinal Tetras
Pygmy Rasboras and the like.
Just about every saltwater fish (main exceptions some clowns and gobies)

Thats quite a sobering thought! I didnt think it was quite that bad! saw a program once on how wild fish are caught and kept, and shipped. its not nice.

 

[Gandalf-LoJ]

This is very true, however there is another side to this that I think is very relevant.

In my case, I have a very nice community setup with lots of little fishies. They are all at the bottom of the food chain in the wild so how many would be eaten? Now in my community aquarium there are no natural predators for them so they are having a longer than normal life than if they were kept in the wild. A small consolation I know, but still. Knowing that you are giving those little fishes the best shot at life they'll ever get is great.

 

[CFC]

Time to pack your tanks away then i'm afraid.

Almost all the fish you see in the local fish stores every time you go there will have been bred in far east Asia or eastern Europe and then shipped to where ever you live, while mortality rates arent huge there are inevitably losses in every shipment, i dont know an exact figure but i would expect it to be somewhere around 10% dead on arivals. Only a very very small percentage of fish sold in shops will have been captive bred locally and this will usually be things like common live bearers and Cichlids.

Then you have the seasonal fish, pretty much anything that you only see every now and again or are a little bit more expensive will have been collected from the wild. This includes most fancy plecs and other catfish with the exception of a few commonly seen Corydoras species, most tetra's with the exception of neons and a handfull of others and pretty much all oddball fish apart from the most commonly seen ones such as Senegal bichirs and black ghost knife fish.

The larger percentage of all the fish you see for sale are most likely wild caught, in most cases it just isnt commercially viable to set up facilities for breeding a species when it can be netted from the rivers in its thousands for a fraction of the cost. However it is not all bad news, the tropical fish industry provides and income for thousands of native people who collect the fish, without this income these same people would turn to farming, logging and mining which destroys the rainforests and pollutes the enviroment.

 

[annka5]

Environmentally, there is a difference in species becoming endangered due to over-fishing and those which are endangered due to habitat destruction, the former being far more common.
Rare in the wild and rare in the hobby are not the same thing.
I have a problem with some wild caught fish, eg some corries which appear in the shops well before their distribution, numbers in the wild, etc etc are even sceintifically documented. Junst in case they turn out to be rare, not a nice thought, is it...?
I don't know what the real mortality of wild caught fish is in the time between being caught and being put into our tanks. ? Anyone know?

 

[jollysue]

Really? I pay less online even with shipping than at the lfs for supplies.

With many species, whose habitates are being destroyed, the hobbyists are preserving the disapearing species. I would just imagine that there is more likelyhood of some commercial fish being fished to extinction than aquarium fish. I don't know this is true, but it seems reasonable.

You have a point and as resonsible people it is in our interests to preserve our heritage however we can.

Many of the popular species, like neon Tetras are bred in commercial fish farms, akin to puppy mills.

 

[eschaton]

I should also add that from what I understand, cyanide fishing is not used in the freshwater fish trade anywhere near the extent it is in the saltwater trade. Most fishing for the fish trade is done via netting. That, and the fact that freshwater fish are generally far more tolarant to shipping, means the casualty rate is far, far lower.

Also, due to the nature of the freshwater side of the hobby, it's unlikely any one species will go extinct in the wild due to the fish trade. This is because most of the popular fish (livebearers, cichlids, bettas, goldfish, etc) are tank-bred somewhere, be it here or in Asia. Those fish that are wild caught have niche markets, and comparably low demand. Compare this to saltwater, where some of the post popular fish are still entirely wild-caught because raising the fry is too complex.

The only freshwater fish at serious danger of going extinct in the wild due to the pet trade, I think, are "fad fish" that are comparably rare. I would not be surprised if the Galaxy Rasbora, for instance, is captured out of existance, given it's apparently from a small, remote part of Myanmar, and everybody and their sister are snatching them up despite the high, wild-caught price.