Most stores do not sell rare fish, especially the harder to find ones. They are to pricey and usually too difficult to find. And there are multiple reasons for this. Take Altum angels. For the most part they needed to be wild as they are very hard to breed them in captivity. Wild ones are hard to keep alive initially. They come out of very acid waters, think around the 4.0 range. They have little resistance to the more common diseases found in our tanks. They not only require very acid water, but it must also be extremely soft. There are too many deaths once they are removed from their native waters unless great care is taken. But they are gorgeous majstic fish.
Then there is the fact that many of them come from rivers bordering on or in Venezuela. For many years fishing in those waters got one shot. Then there is the seasonality factor. Collecting them was not so easy. Then Venezuela eased up, rebels in other countries did as well and more Altums started coming out of SA. But that did not make them any easier to keep alive. But, over time, a few more people figured out how to spawn them.
The four I have had now for several years were spawned by a gent in Las Vegas. He took a few years of learning and then the supervision of an Altum expert to get him through it. He has asked me for advice about spawning zebras on the past. I have no need to ask him for advice on spawning Altums as I could never pull it off.
The plecos I ended up breeding all come from one section of one river in Brazil. All of them are illegal to remove fromthere. Zebra plecos are now endangered. And Brazil put them on the Cites Appendix 3 List a few tears back. This means for them to cross the border of any country which is participant in the CITES treaty must require a certificate of origin for any zebras coming in. Before about 2003 or so there were no laws in Brazil for exporting fish. That all changed and all fish were made illegal to remove. The next step was to create an approved list. These are lists of what could legally be exported. They get revised ever few years.
My first group of proven breeding zebras were wild caught. I bought them in April of 2006. They had to have arrived in the country before the ban/approved lists went into effect. But the demand for the zebras was great and smuggling flourished. This meant a lot of fish deaths along the way out of Brazil. When you have to gide the fish they tend to be poorly packed.
But there was one good side effect to the fish removed illegally which survived. Today there are many hobbyists and a number of commercial breeding operations producing zebras around the globe.
The Belo Monte Dam along with the illegal trade may cause the zebras to become extinct in the wild, but they will live on in aquariums and fish farms around the world. I also breed an even rarer pleco from the same place, the L173. I had two different groups of them. One came from tank raised parents but the other were wild caught fish. I am pretty sure they were illegally removed from Brazil. But they came to me in a very unusual way from an importer's private collection. Originally they were sent to me to try and get spawning. They were not my fish at that time. If I succeeded, I was to get 1/2 of the offspring. I did succeed and ultimately I ended up owning them.
I sell the offspring from the TR parented ones for about 25% less than a same size and sexed true F1s. I also only sell Hypancistrus plecos in groups as I want the fish to go to people who want to try to spawn them. My L236 (regular and super white) I can trace back to their wild origin when they arrived at Aquarium Glaser in Germany. Glaser farmed them out to spawn with one of their breeders- Robert Budrovcan. He then went on to line breed to produce the Super white line.
I think wild fish are a important to have when one can care for them properly. But there are some species which have been line bred for coloration that one will never find wild. Think discus, angels, guppies, bettas or the myriad variations of bristlenose. And these are just a few of the most obvious. All of them started with wild fish.
Wild fish are often more expensive than farmed or tank raised ones of the same species. They also may be harder to collect for any number of reasons. Political considerations as well as places where there is little law may make it impossible to collect them. At other locations pollution may have wiped them out. Some countries are impossible to get into let alone to collect fish in.
I know that many of the more rare fish are typically acquired via more special means. Some species will almost never be found in stores or frpm major online seller. Instead they will come from serious fish nerds who have decent connections and can locate such fish. When it came to my rarest most expensive fish. I lucked into them. I had never seen them offered for sale in the states. To this day they are difficult to impossible to locate as wild caught. One reason is they grow slowly and morph a lot along the way to maturity. They are very difficult to ID when young/small.
All of the Xingu river Hypancistrus I have bred over the years were either wild caught or no more than F2 from wild. I can trace all of them directly back to their wild origin. This is important to me because I am breeding fairly rare fish. However, I have many other fish for which I have no clue on their history. But for the more unique stuff I may know their origin. Buying wild fish also means there is a good chance you will get a better mix of genes. Farmed or tank raised fish are often more limited in terms of genetic diversity.
@Seisage
I am not big on Cichlids. I have only kept 3 species- angels, discus and Pseudocrenilabrus nicholsi. The last one I was given by Don Zilliox, aka Z-man at the 2003 OCA weekend event. Don was an expert Aposto guy. He used to hang out in the same fish chat room as I did. I was going to the OCA and he was as well. When he heard me say I wanted to see mouth brooding in action, he said he would have a pair of mouth brooders for me at the OCA and he refused to allow me to pay him for them. I new little about then except they would thrive in my water in a planted tank. They are small fish so I had a 15 gal. ready for them
P. nicholsi, I have been told, is inch for inch one of the nastiest cichlids out there. I wanted to see mouth brooding and the nicholsi were mouth brooders. Don was very well respected and he wrote a lot of articles before he passed in 2019. I wonder if you are familiar with him? I managed to get them spawning- it was a real adventure. I then sold alld the offspring. The male killed the female and I replaced her with one of the kids. Then the male got entangled in a mass of java fern roots and died there. I found him after the fact.
https://thecichlidstage.com/in-memoriam-don-zman-zilliox/
Male
Female and a few fry she let out into the moss
