Appetite For Reef Fish Devastating Coral Triangle

The growing appetite for live reef fish throughout Southeast Asia is devastating fish populations in the protected Coral Triangle, which supports 75 percent of the world’s coral species and contains the richest ocean diversity anywhere on the globe.

Spawning of reef fish in this marine area has dropped 79 percent over the past 5 to 20 years, depending on location, according to a recent report in the scientific journal Conservation Biology. Overfishing, especially of spawning aggregations that occur when some species of reef fish congregate in great numbers in one place to reproduce, may be the underlying reason, said Yvonne Sadovy, a biologist at the University of Hong Kong. Sadovy co-wrote the report along with scientists from Australia, the United States, Hong Kong and Palau.

The report’s conclusions were based on the first global database on the occurrence, history and management of spawning aggregations, she said. The report includes data from 29 countries or territories along with interviews with more than 300 commercial and subsistence fishers in Asia and the western Pacific from 2002 to 2006.

“The Coral Triangle has relatively few spawning aggregations reported in the communities we went to,” Dr. Sadovy told the New York Times.

“We think that this might be due to the more heavily fished (overall) condition of reef fisheries in many parts of the Coral Triangle, where there is uncontrolled fishing and high demand for live groupers for the international live fish trade.”

Indeed, roughly 30 percent of the species mentioned in the report are sold in Asian markets.