How did you get in to raising tropical fish
for research and as a business?
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Video Text: The reason why we started this project was because we
didn't really like what was going on in the industry. Ninety-five percent
of all the fish sold in pet stores are wild-collected, and unfortunately
most of these fish are collected with unethical methods like chemicals,
especially a chemical called sodium cyanide. What happens is, the diver
will swim down, and as you can imagine, it's difficult to catch a fish
with a net on the reef because they're hiding. What the diver will do is
to squirt a solution of sodium cyanide, a poison, in where the fish is
hiding. It will stun the fish and the fish will float out and they'll
scoop up the fish. But in the process, they are killing non-targeted
organisms like corals, and sometimes they kill the fish. On top of that,
there are five or six or more links in shipping until they end up in
retail stores in the United States. So, you see 80-90 percent mortality or more
from times where they are harvested on the reef to where they end up in
a retail store. That's a really big problem that we didn't like, and
we'd like to be part of the solution to that problem. It's very ironic
that people love these fish. They want to have a slice of the ocean in
their living room, but in the process, they're contributing to
destroying the coral reefs, so the solution for us was to learn how to
raise these fish in captivity.
