c. Reduce the amount of wild caught fish sold in petshops, and increase the amount of funding and research into breeding fish which so far have been unsuccessfully or barely succcessfully bred in captivity.
Is that truly necessary?
Take the Cardinal tetra. I have no problems with it being wild sourced. Millions, and possibly billions of these fish die every year when the floodwaters recede. Collecting a few thousand of them when the waters are high is going to have no detrimental affect on them in the wild.
Also, a number of fish (probably most) exhibit little to no parental care over spawns of fry. Taking the juveniles can give a better chance at life. The taking of mature adults should be closely monitored, however.
The case of the cardinal tetra is deceptive, as all those cardinals who die will become food for other fish and animals. Their dead bodies will also fertilise the soil and lake beds, helping replenish the habitats they live in when the waters return. The same goes for all the juvenile fish- they are food for other animals. If you go around saving all the misfortunate fish in the world, you are inevitably taking away the food that other animals need to eat.
I'll give you an example- last year i watched a nature documentory series called "Survival"(sp?) and in one of the episode they featured an area where kribs naturally lived in the wild. The lakes and rivers which the kribs occupied were a harsh place, and every year when the dry season came, thousands of kribs died as the lakes began to dry up. So the kribs bred like crazy and laid their eggs in the soft mud and gravel beds of the lakes as the dry season progressed.
Most of the adult kribs died as the lakes dried up, but their eggs stayed moist having being laid in under the gravel and mud of the lake and river beds. As the rains returned and the lakes and rivers flooded once more, all the krib fry hatched and ate the dried and long dead bodies of the adult kribs. With all the dead adult kribs that had died during the dry season, their bodies also contributed to the massive algae blooms which followed in the wet season, which also further fed the fry.
So although a lot of kribs died and many were destined to die anyway, their dead bodies fertilised the waters and fed the offspring for a long time. Not just that, but all the misfortunate adult cribs also fed many predatory catfishes living in the surrounding waters and helped many predatory catfish get through the worst of the dry season.
Plundering the wild fish stocks has no real bennefet for the majority of fish ecosystems, and fishkeeping has been more harmful to the survival of a lot of fish in the wild than what you seem to realise. There are quite a few fish than have been banned for export/sale due to the impact that aquarium hobby has had on them like the blue eyed pleco. Although commercial fishing for food obviously takes a far worse toll on wild fish stocks, the aquarium hobby is not completely blameless/innocent either and think we should still be doing more about it, particularly in the case of marine fish.
I keep my 3 male bettas in 1 gallon, and many betta enthusiasts agree that 1g is the minimum tank size for a betta. This is not cruel treatment on my part, it is an proper hom for a betta. By getting rid of less than 2 gallons for bettas and tanks that are small and advertised for goldfish, you make it impossible to find a tank that is small and has the air pump, light etc already in the kit, and then people won't want to buy a fish because they can't get a setup for 20$, they have to pay more to get lights, plants, rocks, filters, all of this...
I am not wishing to "get rid" of tansk under 2gallons as you put it, simply reduce/limit the amount of such tanks sold, and instead increase the amount of larger tanks sold. The only fish i can think of that can go in a tank under 4gallons is a betta. Plus, if you increase the amount of larger tanks being produced, it will inevitable lower the prices/costs for such tanks if they are produced on a larger scale.
There is no way you could change some of those things,although i agree about it.It would cost millions,the fish industry(or whatever it is lol)would go down hill,no1 would want to buy fish anymore because of the image that it's hard and you need a big tank.Plus quite a few people who start fish keeping go into bigger fishes.It wouldn't be fun without them!I totally agree with goldfish for sale at fairs,most people who 'win' them probly don't have fish tanks !
I don't think such changes would create the image that the fishkeeping hobby is hard and thus stop people from joining it. No, i think it would just make people think more about getting into fishkeeping and also respect fish more as living creatures. Too many people at the moment believe that fishkeeping is too easy and undemanding, with the result that many people buy a 5gal tank for their comet goldfish and a tub of flakes and then find out they need a 75gal for such a huge growing goldfish and think "OMG i never knew fishkeeping costed so much" or "I never knew it was more difficult/complicated than what i first believed" etc.
Right now there are even people that don't even want to know about cycling tanks, because they have been fed the image that all you need to keep a fish is some water in a tank and some fish flakes, and would rather keep it at that.
People don't need to keep fish- IMHO, either way its not a bad thing if less people join the hobby because they view it as challenging- its better than more people joining the hobby because they think it is cheap and easy (which for many fishkeepers, not always turns out to be the case at times a lot of the time).
I like Fella's idea about difficult/large fish being made more expensive, so they can only be bought by really committed fishkeepers. I think it would be perfectly reasonable that some fish would be out of the range of most people- well, so what. If I can't afford the large house/large tank/feeding and heating bills- then I shouldn't be keeping these fish. Even as it is, there are lots of fish- and lots of others of life's little luxuries- that I know I will never be able to afford; I view this with equanimity. Only problem is, this pricing policy would be more difficult to enforce than even a ban. Unless they were taxed, of course...
I also like the idea of certain fish (difficult/large) only being sold on licence, so that lfs would have to apply to sell them and not get their licence until they had demonstrated a suitable level of expertise/customer information etc. This would be a way for specialist fish shops to differentiate themselves from non-specialist pet shops. Shops that didn't care to get the expertise would not be allowed to sell a number of species.
Pushing up the price up fish will not improve the quality of buyers to any decent degree- it would also cut out a lot of potentially very good fish keepers from joining the hobby too. Money does not equal a good fishkeeper. Although you certainly need to have a lot of money to buy and keep certain types of fish very well, a wealthy owner doesn't nesarsarily make a better owner.
However i definately agree you should have to have a license to own certain fish (and the license of course should be hard to come by), but at current it is often all too easy to get licenses to sell or own certain animals. It may of course help sort out the serious sellers and owners from the ones who aren't that serious about fishkeeping and teh selling of fish though as you said.
Having said this, there are of course other good reasons to encourage more local (as in: near the final destination) captive breeding: it means fewer individual fish will be subjected to the stress of capture and long transports (but clearly not if they are to be transported from Singapore to the UK), also that the fish will be better acclimatised to local water conditions. I knew there was a reason I need another fry tank.....
I definately agree there should be more localised breeding going on with fish, so many of the fish you see in petshops end up sick or dead due to the stress of the long transportation processes so many have to endure. It would be interesting to see (statistically) how much the mortality/death rates rise amoungst certain types of commonly sold fish the longer they are kept in transport.
EDIT: well there's one PFK article i found on fihs transportation;
http
/www.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/pfk/...?article_id=152
And this one (which i havn't read all the through yet);
http/www.neaq.org/scilearn/research/pdf/16__.pdf
Apparently 20million cardinal tetras have been exported from Rio Negro, Amazonias, Brazil in the last 2 decades, with some researchers estimating a 50% mortality rate during transport while others only a couple of percent.
