A Contemporary Look at the Aquarium Trade for Wild-caught and Captive-bred Saltwater Fish

Abstract

What drives the aquarium trade for wild-caught and captive-bred saltwater fish? The multimillion dollar industry poses many potential threats to marine wildlife and the environment, but sustainable practices like aquaculture and captive breeding could benefit marine communities. Unfortunately, studies and data on globally imported aquarium fish are lacking. We propose an examination of the aquarium fish trade with four research questions: (i) what percent of aquarium fish species are available as captive-bred or wild-caught, (ii) for species that are available as both wild-caught and captive-bred, what are the price differentials, (iii) what species traits, life history traits, or other attributes and traits correlate with the sold aquarium fish species being available as captive-bred or not, (iv) and what species traits, life history characteristics, or other attributes and traits correlate with the pricing of wild-caught fish? Aquarium fish information and prices extracted from three online marine aquarium dealers were combined with additional species traits information via FishBase and IUCN Red List. We found (i) 10.62% of 612 assessed species across three dealers were available as captive-bred, (ii) there was statistically significant difference in captive-bred fish being cheaper than their wild-caught counterparts (p = 0.023), (iii, iv) and there was significant correlation between specific species traits (phylogenetic signals, size, and depth) with likelihood of captive-bred availability and wild-caught fish pricing. We discuss implications of such a small percentage in the aquarium trade as available as captive-bred, that the captive breeding of fish is a commercially viable option if the market return of selling captive-bred fish is below wild-caught fish, and that certain families influence an aquarium fish species’ likelihood to be captive-bred while decreasing size and depth of an aquarium fish species correlates with both decreasing prices and likelihood of availability as captive-bred. An assessment of the aquarium fish industry is the first step towards applying sustainable practices within the aquarium fish trade. Our goal to gain a deeper understanding of the industry allows for a balance of meeting human demands with the ultimate goal of conservation for marine wildlife and ecosystems.