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PROGRAM DEFENDS FISH, CORAL 

The State, Columbia South Carolina, 10/26/2000

Kathryn Winiarski

BALI, Indonesia—Philippines native Ferdinand Cruz earned a living in the 1980s by exporting aquarium fish from tropical reefs to U.S. markets, where demand for tank fish and corals remains high.

Cruz knew most of the Filipino fishermen obtained their catch by squirting cyanide poison onto coral reefs. He knew the practice was illegal and ultimately deadly for fish and corals. But he also knew the poison made fishing cheaper for his suppliers, and police rarely enforced the law.

An international movement is underway to curtail demand for cyanide-caught fish by certifying aquarium stores that sell only fish and corals captured using nondestructive methods such as net collection. The system should be in full swing by mid-2001 in the United States and other countries, said scientists at the ninth International Coral Reef Symposium.

With the cyanide method, fishermen toss a few poison tablets into a squeeze bottle, shake it up, and squirt it into crevices in the reef. Cyanide leaves fish gasping for air and floating to the water’s surface, where they are scooped up. It allows the capture of more fish, with less effort, and for a larger paycheck — a priority for poor workers with families to feed.

“It’s just survival for them,” said Cruz, who works for the nonprofit International Marinelife Alliance, which retrains cyanide fishermen throughout Southeast Asia to fish with nets.

American consumers who patronize local aquarium stores rarely know the destruction that occurs to reefs to satiate their demand for exotic marine creatures. But that is about to change.

Certified aquarium stores will display stickers in their front windows, giving them cachet with consumers. Conscientious shoppers then can be choosy, in the same way as they opt to purchase vegetables grown without pesticides or cosmetics not tested on animals.

“The consumer is increasingly demanding that they are not part of the problem, but are part of the solution,” said Paul Holthus, executive director of the Marine Aquarium Council, a Hawaii-based nonprofit group establishing the standards. “They want a healthy reef, and they want to support an industry that takes care of these animals and the coral reef.”

The aquarium trade is big business, contributing about $200 million to the U.S. economy and about $1 billion globally, Holthus said. Many aquarium store owners lack the knowledge to discern fish and corals caught using cyanide from those collected using sustainable methods.

Fish collected using poison rarely have visible abnormalities when delivered to the exporter’s holding facility. The damage is internal, and the first clue often arises three to six months later when healthy-looking fish perish in someone’s living room tank.

“They tell us it wasn’t caught with cyanide, but we don’t know,” said Agung Setiabudi, owner of CV Dinar, a coral and fish distribution facility in Bali. During a tour of his guard-protected warehouse Wednesday, Setiabudi pointed to row upon row of tanks filled with thumb-size sea horses, brightly colored fish and exotic chunks of coral plucked from the Celebes Sea in Indonesia.

He pays fishermen extra to avoid using cyanide, and supports the certification system.

Certified shops will display a sticker to indicate their fish have been caught, handled and processed using acceptable methods, Holthus said. Consumers and business operators are willing to pay 10 percent to 15 percent more for these products, he said.

All the details have not yet been ironed out. Some dealers who qualify for stickers but stay “dirty” might slip through the cracks, for example. And “sustainable” coral collection has not been defined. Will that mean that fishermen can take only a few corals from each stretch of reef, or that they can collect only the most abundant species?

“Right now we’re trying to determine how much is going to be sustainable in terms of extraction,” Cruz said. With thousands of ocean miles to patrol, enforcement of destructive fishing laws has been lax. Police either lack the funds to buy gasoline for their boats or are bribed by middlemen to do nothing, said Lida Pet-Soede of World Wildlife Fund, a fisheries program manager in Indonesia.

Even if police were vigilant, villagers could easily conceal the poison tablets, Cruz said. That’s why his job of getting locals excited about reef-friendly collection methods is so important. If they don’t buy in, destructive practices will continue.

“They bring tons and tons of cyanide into the community, and nobody can find it because it’s well hidden, right there on the ocean floor,” Cruz said.

About the Writer

Kathryn Winiarski is a health and medical writer for The State. She received a scholarship from the Packard Foundation to cover the ninth International Coral Reef Symposium in Bali, Indonesia.  She is one 15 journalists chosen to cover the conference.