Cyanide Fish

I find it very frustrating in buying saltwater fish, the fish looks healthy, good colors and eating and you stick it in quaratine or not and one day you come home and it is dead! I ask all the local Lfs and the owner tells me they don't buy cyanide fish from their suppliers. I ask the owner how can you tell a cyanide caught fish for a net caught? I think some fish should last more than a week?

 

I don't think cyanide is as widely used as it once was.
but there are 1000 other reasons a fish doesn't last. Most are stressed out beyond belief and are starving.
Lets see if Gresham chimes in on this one I know he is very familiar with capture methods


BTW were in Canada are you?

J

 

I have talk to some Lfs employee's and they tell me they also suspect some of the fish they are selling are cyanide caught because they don't last in their tanks long term!

 

Hmmm Cyanide fishing, IMO although some still fish this way, I think that explosives are used more. I agree with Jason that its more likely due to another factor.

 

Now not to flame you Bruce, but do you understand what explosions do to fish? NO FISH CAPTURED FOR THE MOI IS EVER CAUGHT WITH EXPLOSIVES, NONE!!!!! Food fish yes, live fish no. A bombed fish is a dead or dying fish.


Now, about the cyanide and your fish dying. I highly doubt your fish are dying due to being captured with cyanide. CN exposure kills most pre-exporter, and the remaining unhealthy ones die at the wholesaler and exporter. The ones that make it, usually live for a long time. One huge probloem for you, is your in Canada, kinda a long way away from the tropics, eh The extended journey for your fish is a major factor of DOA and DAA. Cyanide is still used, although in PI it's slowing down. Unfortunatly, Indo has picked up for the slow down in PI, so it's still a major problem(black eye) for the MOI as a whole. It's suspected that theres about 800-2000 cyaniders left in PI, and no guess as to what Indo has going on now.

 

Thanks for the heads-up Jay now if I change my email account to send me email alerts, I might be able to chime in quicker

 

Well, even if there are no fish that survive, which is not true because many only become stunned due to the shock, it still happens. If you dont believe me check out this article and pictures. http://members.tripod.com/wwfsahul_cs/marine.htm I think that instead of targeting the fish with the dynamite they put it in the open water and let the shock effect the fish, then they scoop em up.

But hey, if my sources are wrong then im wrong...

 

Yes, your internet sources are in fact wrong. Cyanide fish are stunned (or spiral into a death fit), bombed ones either die, or the side that is facing the blast becomes one giant hemerage. If they float, they're most likely dead. Yes some survive, the ones that can swin away

FWIW, that MOI blast fishing bit has been used by some pretty hefty groups, like the WWF, TNC, GEF and the UN. Just because they say it, doesn;t make it true. For the truth, seek out collectors in Bali, Indo, PI, etc and speak to them, as I have Honestly Bruce, it's a food fishing thing. Now MOI collectors typically do both in a trip, so the myth could have been started by that fact alone.

I've spent a decade on the cyanide/sustainable fisheries issue. I worked for most of that time for a man that knows the issue best on the planet, has helped do something positive about it, has lived all sides, exposed it in the early 80's and wrote about it. In fact, he was collecting fish before you were even born my friend

 

Well, i stand corrected ^^. One question is, what is stopping reef farming completly? Dont we have the tech to aquaculture everything we need...but it not now, soon.

 

We do for many, others are a bit harder to do in a farm setting, and have more then a sustainable fishery model to follow. Also, many fishing villages can't farm at their location, so they'd have to find new work, which would devalue the reef considerably. Wild collections belive it or not, can be sustainable and is "value added". The MOI trade is the highest "value added" activity thus far presented to these villages.

Farms are popping up all over the place and with CITES quotas shrinking and the market place increasing, the demand for new farms will be great.

This is all coral based stuff though. MOI fish collecting can be fully sustainable, and at the current feed bottle neck, only less then 1% of our speices can be bred commercially. I do suspect that many villages can be set-up to do some kind of local aquaculture in the future, but that will take outside resources and training.