One area where MAC has gone wrong...

[PeterIMA]

Reply to Blue Hula, I am not clear what proportion of "everything traded" is comprized of damselfish (in the genera you mentioned) and clownfishes (also in the family Pomacentridae). The testing done by IMA indicated that they comprized more than several hundred species. They are abundant, low priced, and generally in demand. These and other "bread and butter species" need to be captured and sold somewhat in proportion to their abundances on the reefs. Do we disagree on that?

Peter

 

[blue hula3]

Reply to Blue Hula, I am not clear what proportion of "everything traded" is comprized of damselfish (in the genera you mentioned) and clownfishes (also in the family Pomacentridae). The testing done by IMA indicated that they comprized more than several hundred species. They are abundant, low priced, and generally in demand. These and other "bread and butter species" need to be captured and sold somewhat in proportion to their abundances on the reefs. Do we disagree on that?

Peter

G'day Peter,
I absolutely agree that bread and butter species need to be sold in proportion to their abundance, more or less.

What I was trying to show was that market demand doesn't necessarily equate to abundance thus the model of "collect to order" is necessary to reduce wastage, but also insufficient, as alone it won't necessarily reflect wild abundance. Doesn't very well at all in terms of Australia.

In terms of the % of everything traded, the damsel/clown group accounts for 34% of the trade based on export records, or 37% of the trade based on imports. So that mismatch betweem unfettered market demand and Australian "supply" applies to a little over a third of fish traded as reported in GMAD.

Cheers, Jessica

 

[horge]

...fishers must collect according to wild abundance AND market demand as I'm not sure how often these are the equivalent.
Resource assessments of wild populations and ongoing monitoring seem pretty key.

Yes. Claiming an overall drop in fishes collected sounds nice, after all, no unwanted fish are removed. But since the pretense of sustainability is to preserve a reasonable population of desired species... there has to be an effort to diversify demand: to diffuse collection pressure towards other, under-collected species ---which you touch on immediately following:

Any marketing guru out there that knows how to turn half-blacks into Nemo equivalents?

Take a page from gun magazines.
Treat a species simply as a product to be reviewed and hyped:
One can utilize great photography, solid writing on its care and natural biology/life history to pique market interest, provide a local legend or even just a native name (remember the humuhumu nukunuku a'puaa?) and call it exotic...

and THEN introduce it at a respectably-elevated price,

Again, look at guns and gun magazines:
How else to explain the popularity of firearms like the Desert Eagle .50AE: an unwieldy answer in clueless search of a question? Taurus and Para-Ordnance build quite a bit of junk, yet both enjoy healthy sales because they pay for media exposure for their merch: reviews and ads.

There is already a built in publication base for US retailers to exploit. Why not support a 'reviewer' to cover 2 species a month? This actually used to happen openly and honestly three decades ago, when rags would (quite effectively) push the latest deformity out of Malawi/Lake Tanganyika...

You can couple the printed word with internet bb adverts AND support for new buyers. A thread here, a thread there, in support of species X... how much does that cost, eh?

In truth, every fish can be fascinating and command good prices, if you just enlighten the market.

It's probably too late to help a fish that's already in the market.
You can "launch" a product only one every so many years, you know...


horge