Ethics Of Buying Cardinal Tetras

[beej]

Hi all,

I already have 6 pearl danios and was thinking of adding a group of 10-12 cardinal tetras as my second fish. I've loved cardinals since I was very young and they have always been the #1 fish on my list while I have been planning and maturing my tank. I read that they require a fairly mature tank so I resisted the temptation to make them the first fish in my tank.

While researching their requirements I came across this: http/faq.thekrib.com/fish-popular.html

To quote one bit:
"Cardinals will have a greater chance of not dying immediately after purchase but even they will probably not live long in your home tank. They are wild caught in Brazil as adults so they may have lived most of their naturally short life span before you buy them."

Can anyone expand on this? While I would LOVE a school of cardinals, I don't want to buy fish that are taken from the wild unless they are totally sustainable. Pretty much every shop I've been in has cardinals so I guess they can't be rare but even so, I'd rather pick a different fish than feel in some small way responsible for the destruction of an Amazonian ecosystem.

Secondly, if I am OK to buy cardinals then is the observation that they will soon die of old age correct? Dean seems pretty clued-up. It goes without saying that I don't want to buy fish that will not live long.


Thanks a million for your guidance,
Jon

 

[annka5]

What you might be seeing in lots of LFS is neon tetra rather than cardinals? They look similar, but have silvery tummy / chest where cardinal don't. They are a different species from cardinals. They breed in captivity, and live (this is strange) up to 10 years in a tank. If you do feel there's a moral issue with cardinals, then perhaps you'd try neon's instead.
A freind of mine has cardinals, she's had the same ones for about 3 years, has soft acidic water where she lives, takes fairly good care of them but nothing really special, they're still going strong.
As to numbers of wild caught compared to captive bred cadinals, I'd suggest most nowadays are captive bred - the ones I see in LFS are just too small to be adults. Admittedly that's not a particularly scientific way to judge!! However, am really not sure of that.
Seriously, when was the article written? it could be a that-was-then-this-is-now issue: true when the author wrote the article, but no longer the case.
Most endangered fish result from either introduction of non-native species which outcompete (e.g. rift lake cichlids vs Nile perch), or habitat destruction, rather than fishing for ornamental fish industry.

 

[The-Wolf]

the cardinals that we get in from work are often tank raised in the Czech republic,
although we do sometimes get wild caught from Brazil.

ask your LFS wether or not they are wild or tank raised.
if they don't know then I doubt they know what they are doing and I wouldn't buy from there

 

[illusion54]

I myself do not support wild caught fish, as must of their environments are being threatened and the species may no longer exist in the wild, but that's just my opinion.

 

[IMCL85]

I dont really care about wild caught or tank raise as long its health thats all I'm concern about when I'm buying fish.

 

[andywg]

According to Baensch, cardinal tetras die in their millions as they get trapped in drying lakes and lagoons as the dry season takes hold in the Amazon. For this reason I would not feel overly bad about buying cardinals.

If it is wild caught then there can be no way to know how much of its life span has been lived other than knowing if it has reached adult size or not. To be honest - from looking at the linked site - it looks far more to me like he bought these fish, that can be delicate, and put them in his tank and got upset that he lost them.

 

[ARXC08]

I have cardinals and have no moral objection against it since they can be tank bred. Most likely very few are wild caught nowadays. Also that article could of been written a long time ago. Also are you sure your seeing cardinals, and not neons. Because i found it very hard to find cardinals and they were pretty pricey.

Here is a pic of a Neon Tetra

Here is a pic of a Cardinal Tetra

See they are pretty similar in the picture, but the cardinals look a lot better than neons IMO

 

[nmonks]

Hello,

I actually broached this sort of issue while writing the "conservation" and "controversy" sections of a Fishkeeping article I created for Wikipedia. According to the most recent statistics I could find, over 90% of ornamental fish (i.e., aquarium and pond fish) are tank bred. However, significant numbers are wild caught, and in some situations this is known to have a negative effect on local populations of fish.

The for argument basically runs like this: Collecting wild caught fish depends on (a) extracting sustainable numbers each year and (b) maintaining the natural habitat. Only if both are satisfied, will the local community be able to catch and sell wild caught fish year after year. Since wild caught fish are a cash crop, they bring in revenue to remote areas in developing countries that might otherwise have little to sell of economic value.

The against argument is this: in virtually every case where similar situations have existed, e.g., commercial fishing, whaling, logging, hunting birds for their feathers, fur trapping, etc., the end result has been overexploitation. Almost never has the equilibrium been maintained, either in the developed or the developing world without some sort of enforced legislation, and almost always this has been after and not before the collapse of the natural resource.

However, ornamental fish are different in one key regard. Where normally these industries have been based on slow growing, slowly reproducing organisms (what ecologists call K-selected organisms), ornamental fish are almost invariably fast-growing, rapidly reproducing species (r-selected organisms). In mammalian terms, it's comparing whales with rabbits. So, in theory at least, aquarists are buying animals of the types that naturally have a high mortality rate anyway and are pre-adapted to quickly make up the numbers.

Cardinal tetras certainly fit this categorisation: they only live a few years at best, and are capable of producing hundreds, if not thousands, of offspring over the course of theur lifetime. So the probability is that the impact that the aquarium hobby has is probably not harmful and certainly reversable. Over the long term, some management may be a good idea, but I can't see cardinals being in any dange of extinction in the same way as whales or sturgeons.

On the flip side, IMCL85's comment that all that matters is the health of the stock is, in my view, selfish. Aquarists should be ambassadors for the hobby, and part of that is having a sensitivity for conservation and a code of ethics about what is and is not reasonable to expect from exporters and traders. Just as the majority of aquarists abhor dyed fish for being cruel, so should aquarists pressure traders to source fish from places that have well regulated industries. The classic example of where this isn't the case is in the Philippines, where cyanide has been widely used to stun marine fish, of which only a few are collected, resulting in significant damage to the biodiversity of fish on the coral reefs.

Sincerely,

Neale

 

[beej]

Wow!! Thanks to all for your informed and detailed responses. As you can see, I’m new to the forum (and to the hobby) but this is clearly a GREAT place to learn

I’m definitely interested in Cardinals and not Neons. My LFS sells both and the way I found to tell them apart (although this may not be correct) is that the Neons have a thin blue stripe down the front half of the body, whereas Cardinals have a broader blue stripe down the whole length of the body (please correct me if I’m wrong!!). Based on the article I linked to, the outlook for Neons is much worse than for the Cardinals:

“The Neon has the added drawback that almost all of them are bred in the Far East in huge numbers with no regard to quality. Further, the raising ponds for the young fish are filled with medicines. The medicines keep diseases in check but as soon as the fish are shipped they begin to get sick. They die in huge numbers in the stores and in buyer's home tanks. Probably less than 1 in 10 Neons lives for more than one month after being removed from the pond it was raised in.”

The article was posted on Usenet in 2000 but it looks to me like it could be several years older still. Therefore I guess things could have moved on a lot since it was written.

I think I’ll go ahead with the Cardinals based on the responses to this post. It sounds like I will be able to sleep easy at night, safe in the knowledge that I’m not a bad person for owning them

Thanks again!!