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Greater Seattle Aquarium Society

Title As You Wish: Fish Ethics

by Heather Candelaria
November 1998

This month I would like to bring up a topic which still makes me a little uneasy. I’m going to refer to this topic as fish ethics. It has to do with the way people treat their fish and whether or not that treatment is to be considered humane.

These issues are much more complex than simply deciding whether or not it is appropriate to put two male betta splendens together to see them fight. I’m talking about things like buying feeder fish at 10 for a dollar, either to feed to other fish or to sacrifice in the process of getting a tank cycled through its ammonia and nitrite-heavy periods. I’m talking about the way discus have had their immune systems bred out of them, or how some fish just simply do not adapt to captivity well enough to warrant attempting to keep them. I even ponder whether I can honestly agree that it is a good idea to keep salt water fish; we capture fish which live in the largest body of water on earth, schooling but the hundreds over miles of coral reef, and put them in a teeny tiny glass box in our living room just because we think that they are darn pretty fish.

I myself find the most abominable genetic frankenstein experiments (i.e. fancy goldfish) to be darn pretty fish. These monstrosities are barely capable of living the life of a fish, and sometimes need to be treated more like their poetic name of water flowers. We’ve been selectively breeding these mutants for over a thousand years, and what we are doing to them is definitely not for their own benefit.

If we buy feeder fish we can justify the loss of piscine life because we are sacrificing one fish to another, and those feeders are farm raised just to become some other fishes dinner, right? Its all just like in the wild and that somehow seems to make it all seem okay.

When my customers come to me with their tails of woe of the death of their fish, I will occasionally let them have the terrible truth that it was all their own fault. Other times, especially when the person has done everything in their power to save the fish, I’ll tell them to look around the store, and then I’ll inform them that every single fish in the store is going to die. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some time within the next few years most of them will probably end up dead. The only thing to realize is that every day a fish lives in an aquarium, is a day longer that fish has survived. I tell them not to think of every fish death as a failure, but of every surviving fish as a success.

The truth is that in most cases a fish has a much better chance at a long and happy life in your fish tank than he does in the wild. This may sound odd, but if you look at it in the correct way you will see the point I’m trying to make. The correct way is to look at the percentages of fish which survive.

There are a great number of fish harvested from the wild every year, but in most cases the fish industry barely even comes close to making the slightest dent in the population. The reason for this is that most fish engage in the reproductive method of having hundreds of offspring in the hopes that one or two will make it to adulthood. This method of breeding, means that during a certain period (like the rainy season in South America) there are billions and billions of fish born, but by the time the dry season comes around, only a tiny fraction of that original number remains.

Where do they go? Well, close to 99% of them die of starvation, predation, disease, and environmental accidents. Some of them are collected and become members of our favorite past time.

Of the fish that make it to your aquarium, How many live through their first year? I’d be willing to bet that it is easily more than 1%. And if those fish happen to spawn for you, what percentage of the fry generally live, and get passed on to other hobbyists? All things being equal, you’ve got to admit that the fish we care for have life pretty easy compared to their counterparts in the wild.

In addition to having a better chance at life in our tanks, remember that for every little tetra harvested from the wild there is a little more food left for his brother back in the Amazon, and for every batch of fish taken from the bottom of the food chain, there are also others taken from the top of the food chain, and so some nasty cichlid who would have eaten the tetra brothers, gets to eat farm raised goldfish instead.