Keeping captive-bred fish has gotten easier
Remember when keeping a saltwater aquarium was just for experts? Now, the technology has advanced to the point where just about anyone can do it and expect to keep the fish alive and healthy.
Where the fish come from has also changed: Many are now bred for the trade instead of caught in the wild — a difference that tends to be healthier for the fish and the environment.
Dante Fenolio, vice president for conservation and research at San Antonio Zoo, in Texas, remembers what the business was like in the 1970s and early 1980s: “My dad owned a company that imported fresh water and marine fish from all over the world,” he says. “I don’t recall there being anything when I was a kid that was regularly captive-bred. Every now and again someone would say they got a clownfish to breed, but then they had problems with the young... It was nothing like it is now.”
The most recent list of captive-bred species compiled by Tal Sweet for Coral Magazine totals 330. Twenty-seven species are judged as “commonly available” and 38 “moderately available” — plenty of choices with which the new hobbyist can stock a tank.
Sweet started compiling the list — a joint effort between the magazine and the Marine Life Aquarium Society of Michigan — in 2013, when the total was a little over 200 species. So progress has been rapid, and impressive, because figuring out how to breed these fish is not simple.
“It’s not like putting two animals of opposite sex together and just saying go do it,” says Fenolio. Temperature and season are important, but that’s just the start, and each species presents its own challenges. In the wild, critical details might include lunar cycle, changes in salinity, even other species’ breeding. “A lot of species won’t breed unless their prey species is breeding around them — they won’t get going till their babies will have something to eat,” he says.
Such efforts, however, have created a range of captive-bred options for the hobbyist, and experts suggest sticking to them.
For one thing, captivebred fish are likely to start