Corals; Where do they come from?

I'm afraid that one day I'm going to click on 3reef and read an article that imports of most corals are now illegal. All my SPS are aquacultured but every now and then there is the LPS that came from the ocean.

 

Great article thank you so much!

 

Eek! What did you end up doing with them?

 

PI has been banned for over 20 years (iirc)... and it was there doing, not ours. They needed to protect what little coral they had(have) left.

Right now there is a push to outright ban all wild marine animal imports. They want it to work like the wild bird ban of which effectively bans all wild birds with how it works.

 

We have a local smuggler, er, wholesaler that routinely tries to bring them in. I suspect he gets away with it once in a while. IIRC last year he tried to bring in a 30+ box shipment over Christmas with the bottom layers all coral. He probably didn't think USF&WS would check em, but they did and caught him. To my dismay he's still in business (and has been busted more times then anyone can count)

 

Gresham,

He met them in California so I'm sure it's one and the same person. I refused to take the corals to the store from the QT warehouse but they ended up disappearing. I made it clear verbally and via email to S. that I better NOT see them in the store. I don't know where they went but none made it to the store....it was kinda like, "If I don't know, I can't testify". It still makes me angry. My opinion of S. dropped by a thousand percent that day. We better regulate ourselves properly or our hobby that we care so much about is going to disappear.

 

Oh man you're the man Curt I've been preaching those words for the last decade

 

Philippine corals are illegal to collect? I get transship lists with them on it all the time...just the other day i got one. If they are illegal, USF&W should open a pet store and have these people send them confessions....

how do you guys feel about octocorals, and softies? they don't really have the same issues in the wild as the stony corals, and often aren't really coral but quasi anemone...gorgs, rics, zoas for instance?

my take -
Florida cracked down on the ric market recently, which was a pretty good move. Oddly enough though they do better on the reefs open for collection then in the marine preserves. I don't think there is any correlation, unless collectors are fragging their colonies underwater for future use...just coincidence. Their environmental value isn't the same as true corals, so while it used to bother me, it doesn't really anymore now that the regs have a understandable size limit. (The bag limit decreased by 75% which drove enough people out of work that the catches aren't so bad anymore)

gorgs - on gorg reefs they cover like wildfire, but present more habitat value than rics or zoas...and a food source for the flamingo snail

zoas - not much habitat value, and pretty common. i think florida's no rock can be taken with the zoa coupled with the 1 gallon a day rule makes for sustainable regulation..... 1 gallon probably seems like a lot, but the cost of the license is 50k plus usually, and even with the popularity of zoas these days they are considered to be on the rise in florida. I also liked seeing hobbyist collection curtailed. Nothing against the hobbyist, and I know they will end up getting them through the collectors anyway, but with a few hundred thousand divers going to the reefs that have no vested interest in the future of the colonies, I think from a regulation standpoint it can be troublesome for authorities to monitor collection of popular species, when their is broad hobbyist collection opportunity. (Commercial collectors are very few in number, less than 70 in the state. By contrast, I think 250k divers visit the reefs each year.

but what do you all think?

Thanks for your opinions, this is a subject if interest for me.

 

Let me rephrase....STONEY CORALS are illegal to collect and export from PI.

Even substrate is illegal to export... read on:
German National Pleads Guilty to Smuggling Coral from the Philippines | Import Industry News

Contact BFAR if you think I am wrong. I can tell you I am not wrong though. PI is a CITES member, search for quotas on stony corals and see what you find (nothing).

 

i wasnt disagreeing with you, i was just saying/reporting what they send me. they have mostly corals on that list (stoney, true corals etc...). was just saying what they send me.

i read that about that guy before. calcium reactor bust...the article kind of trumps it up to make it sound like he brought in a truckload of colonies, but I guess the impact is the same and illegal is illegal however you slice it. i am not a fan of substrate collection either, and i think florida took the right approach be banning its harvest here.