Pet fish lovers beware, your aquarium might contain a dirty little secret. New research shows that the overwhelming majority of aquarium fish sold in the U.S. are caught from the wild.
Scientists studied several large online aquarium retailers based in the U.S., finding that of the hundreds of different fish species sold at these places, about 90% were collected from the wild. Dozens of species sold by these retailers were also found to be facing population threats, indicating that the aquarium trade is actively harming marine conservation efforts.
Wild and not free
The study’s lead author, Bing Lin, conducted this research as part of his doctorate at Princeton University.
“As my PhD supervisor and study co-author, Professor David Wilcove, would say, this study sat at the perfect intersection of interest, importance, and feasibility,” Lin told Gizmodo. He is now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney’s Thriving Oceans Research Hub.
“Earlier parts of my PhD focused on web scraping, the wildlife trade, and marine conservation. This project brought those threads together into a single, data-driven look at a massive but understudied global trade,” Lin said.
All in all, Lin and his team analyzed data from four major U.S.-based aquarium retailers. They identified 734 different species across 13 broad families of fish being sold at these stores.
Almost all of these species—665—were sourced exclusively from the wild, they found, while only 21 species were sourced entirely from marine farms, also known as aquaculture. What’s more, 45 of the species they identified are known to be experiencing population declines, with 20 of these classified as threatened. Of these at risk fish species, 38 were sourced completely from the wild.
The team’s findings, published Wednesday in Conservation Biology, likely underestimate the problem, Lin said. Their data only included fish families known to have at least one species commonly bred in captivity, meaning the true proportion of wild-caught fish may be higher. They also didn’t investigate other commonly sold sea life for aquariums, including invertebrates like corals and crustaceans.
A place for aquarium fish
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