Re: Lake Nawampassa (was re: tubarosa revisited)

peter.unmack at asu.edu
Fri, 12 Apr 1996 20:26:44 -0700 (MST)

On Tue, 2 Apr 1996, Cynthia.Teague wrote:
> Les Kaufman said, in part:
{snip snip]

> make money, others just want to share -- but few would be happy just saving a
> handful of fry and using the rest as live food, especially if the species in
> question were endangered. ("they're endangered, but I'm being asked to kill
> them?")

If only non biologists could understand that sometimes species need to be
killed/removed to protect themselves (speaking in the broader sense--more
typically mammals, ie deer, kangaroos, koalas etc). That's an educational
issue that the media usually does it's best to screw up. Mind you,
interms of aquarists maintaining endangered fish in a co-ordinated
program, (unlike this example) I can't think of an example where someone
would be expected to kill perfectly good excess individuals.

> As Adrian Tappan pointed out in regard to eachamensis, it's important to
> explode a tiny population into a large one as quickly as possible to keep as
> much heterozygosity as possible -- so doesn't it make sense for aquarists to
> start breeding & circulating these species?

>From the little I know about this proposal the whole idea is to get the
local people to conserve their own fishes. If they are able to do an
adequate job of achieving this then why should aquarists need to maintain
them for conservation purposes? We don't need to be duplicating the
efforts of others. There are more than enough endangered fish in the
world to go around all the zoos and aquarists (with probably a few
species to spare). Also, as has been pointed out, the KEY to the success
of this project is maintaining a market for the fish. An unsteady or
negligable market for the fish is what is most likely to cause this
project to fail.

> Or are you saying that population
> levels would just drop back down again when these are no longer "poster fish"?
> But then at least the remainer would have more genetic variety than what you'd
> have if the fishery at Lake Nawampassa maintained a small colony of breeders
> for the same period of time (since there would be more American-bred &
> therefore cheaper fad fish than there would be imported single specimens or
> their moral equivalent)

I would image that they would be looking to maintain a large colony of
breeders with regular inputs of wild fish.(?) Thus, they shouldn't have
problems with genetic diversity.

Hooroo

Peter