Abstract
The aquarium trade and other wildlife consumers are at a crossroads forced by threats from global climate change and other anthropogenic stressors that have weakened coastal ecosystems. While the wildlife trade may put additional stress on coral reefs, it brings income into impoverished parts of the world and may stimulate interest in marine conservation. To better understand the influence of the trade, we must first be able to quantify coral reef fauna moving through it. Herein, we discuss the lack of a data system for monitoring the wildlife aquarium trade and analyze problems that arise when trying to monitor the trade using a system not specifically designed for this purpose. To do this, we examined an entire year of import records of marine tropical fish entering the United States in detail, and discuss the relationship between trade volume, biodiversity and introduction of non-native marine fishes. Our analyses showed that biodiversity levels are higher than previous estimates. Additionally, more than half of government importation forms have numerical or other reporting discrepancies resulting in the overestimation of trade volumes by 27%. While some commonly imported species have been introduced into the coastal waters of the USA (as expected), we also found that some uncommon species in the trade have also been introduced. This is the first study of aquarium trade imports to compare commercial invoices to government forms and provides a means to, routinely and in real time, examine the biodiversity of the trade in coral reef wildlife species.
Highlights
Every year, millions of marine organisms are removed from the world’s coral reefs and associated habitats and inserted into a pipeline that empties into more than two million homes and public aquariums worldwide [1,2]
From May 2004 to May 2005, marine ornamental fish entered the United States on 8,015 discrete invoices that reported a total of 11,003,181 marine fish
Our detailed review of shipment invoices demonstrated that (a) the number of individual fish listed on shipment declarations matched the invoices only 52% of the time and (b) in total, volume was over-reported by 27% as shipments were often mislabeled to contain marine fish (MATF) when they harbored only freshwater fish, corals, and/or other wildlife products
Summary
Millions of marine organisms are removed from the world’s coral reefs and associated habitats and inserted into a pipeline that empties into more than two million homes and public aquariums worldwide [1,2]. Extraction occurs primarily from biodiverse coral reefs within the Coral Triangle Region, including the waters off the pacific countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste [4]. The most recent estimates suggest that the trade targets over 150 species of stony corals, hundreds of species of non-coral invertebrates, and at least 1,472 reef fish species from 50 families [2,5,6]. Collectors draw upon the full suite of coral reef biodiversity to supply aesthetic and life-support aquarium services [7]
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