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Our coral propagation company in Palau (Palau Biotech Marine Tropicals) was approached by fisheries people from Taiwan. The Chinese there have a very aggressive program for the propagation of marine food fishes and are successful with many commercially valuable species. Their proposal to us - capture large groupers and ship the gravid females live to Taiwan where they have been conducting experiments to hatch out and raise the grouper fry in captivity. So far they have had little success in getting the hatch past the larval stage. Once the tiny fingerlings reach the stage where the feeding is no problem their value jumps to $3.00 each. Considering that a large grouper can have a couple million eggs in her and that the hatch rate exceeds 50% - that makes one fish worth at least a million dollars!! Click here for more info, THE LIVE GROUPER MARKET.
My wife and I no longer consider ourselves Fish Cowboys - the last round up has come and gone for us. Age and interest have carried us out of the physically demanding profession of the marine life collector. But we still have an interest in what is going on with mariculture in general and the marine tropicals in particular. So I recently jumped at the opportunity to visit an old marine biologist friend, Vince Rado, who is involved in one of the world's most progressive projects for the culturing of marine ornamentals, at Vero Beach, Florida.
The place is called 'HARBOR BRANCH OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTE', which has a lot of different ocean related projects going on at this time. But their progress (and rapidly climbing sales!) in the mariculture of ornamentals shows a promising future for 'farming' just about anything we want FROM the ocean as well as FOR the ocean. By that I mean we are developing the technology to re-seed the reefs and ocean with farmed stock for the recovery of all endangered species. We should expect to develop the capability to undo the harm done by man or nature - only ignorance, neglect, and lack of desire to work with nature can hold that promise back.
When that happens I guess the days of the wild 'round up' by fish cowboys will be over and the stock for the world's aquariums will come from the new marine 'fish farmers'. The fish farmers have their challenges to struggle with too, and they will have their achievements to boast about - but the fish cowboys have lived the romantic life of adventure and danger that appeals so much to the human spirit - as much as the desire 'to collect'!
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