Imagine for a moment that you’re an untroubled reef fish in a warm tropical ocean.
The thinking box of even quite a large fish is rather small, so you will not be agonizing over world affairs, your relationship or your cholesterol levels. Life is simple. You spend your days loitering around the reef, grazing on lower life forms and avoiding predators. You enjoy the occasional uncommitted amorous interlude with another of your kind. Your borderless world is full of colour and sounds and interesting flavours.
Then one day a diver appears from above, squirts a solution of cyanide in your face and you wake up inside a plastic bag. You spend the rest of your life in a glass box in a dentist’s office, eating synthetic fish-flavoured flakes when someone remembers to feed you. The things Homo sapiens do to other species would read like science fiction if we did them to each other.
The aquarium trade is huge and Indonesia has been a major exporter of reef fish since the 1960s. This lucrative industry is unregulated, and until the present there has been no way to manage collection activities, keep records or establish statistics on ornamental fish populations.
Typically the fishermen who collect aquarium fish come from poor, isolated communities with no real alternatives for generating income. Older fishermen in Bali say that wildlife seemed limitless a generation ago. In their lifetime they’ve watched their rich natural resources dwindle and disappear. What has always been a hard, dangerous living is harder than ever for the second generation that now pursues it. The highest-priced aquarium fish have been fished out from local reefs and now collectors must travel to distant islands to find them. Using the simplest of diving gear, air compressors with multiple air lines called ‘hookahs’ and with only the skimpiest understanding of the hazards of diving, Balinese collectors risk their lives to fill the aquariums of European and North American hobbyists.
It’s pretty hard on the fish too. The traditional collecting technique hasn’t changed in 40 years. Fishermen make a solution of potassium cyanide, which is freely available in small shops, and mix it up in a plastic squirt bottle. Then they dive to the reef, identify a target fish and squirt the cyanide toward its face, hoping it will only be stunned. But it’s hard to control the dose of cyanide or the drift of the poison along the reef, where it kills the sensitive coral polyps. The amount of cyanide needed to stun a large fish kills hundreds of other organisms too. The target fish often die from the chemical, or are damaged while being collected. An estimated 80% of ornamental fish may die of stress or mishandling in transit.
But the wind of change — just a little breeze at this point — is beginning to blow through the industry. The Marine Aquarium Council (MAC), an international organization based in Hawaii, is working with collectors, exporters and retailers to help create a sustainable industry that will benefit everyone.
MAC is represented in Bali by marine biologist Gayatri Lilley (the MAC Indonesia Coordinator), and her husband Ron who provides technical support. The adventurous couple met on an expedition to Maluku in 1987, married and moved to Irian Jaya when their son was six weeks old. They have been working in the field of conservation around Indonesia ever since.
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Traditionally, conservation efforts have been in conflict with local communities,” says Gayatri. “Business and conservation are always at loggerheads. To ban reef fishing is not the answer. As long as there’s something to sell and people are hungry, the trade will continue. Over a thousand Balinese fishermen support their families by collecting ornamental fish. There have to be compromises.
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But it’s no good going into a community at random and imposing a conservation program. The community has to be carefully selected, and it has to be the community’s own program, designed by the people themselves to meet their needs. Local NGOs are crucial in helping to achieve this. The fishermen and other local stakeholders will need initial training and support in order to eventually manage their own resources more sustainably. We are only working with communities that are already involved in the aquarium fish trade, and for which alternative income options do not exist. We would like to establish a model pilot project that other interested parties can visit”.
The MAC slogan is ‘From Reef to Retail’. The organization’s ultimate goal is to see certification in every link of the chain from the collection area to the hobbyist’s aquarium, but that’s a long way off. It means establishing sustainable exploitation by collectors, monitoring the resources, standardizing collection, handling and transportation and educating the end buyer. Surveys in Europe indicate that there is a marked willingness among hobbyists to pay more for certified fish.
MAC is active in Fiji, Central and South America, Hawaii, Indonesia and the Philippines, where certification is already a reality in some places. MAC’s program in Bali begins in a village on the north coast.
The fishermen of Tejakula sub-district have been collecting reef fish for 30 years. When the Lilleys approached them with the concept of the MAC program, the elders of the village immediately saw the benefits and encouraged the community to embrace it. The fishermen had watched their only resource dwindle in a single generation. They worried that if too many resorts were built along that stretch of coast, there would be nowhere left to fish.
In Bali, communities don’t traditionally take a long-term approach to managing their resources. But the fishermen were quick to understand that although the program wouldn’t mean an increase in the number of fish they could catch, they could continue to fish more sustainably than if they kept using their old methods.
The first mammoth task is to establish the collection area. This involves researching traditional resource rights and boundaries, mapping the area, getting everyone to agree on management rules, and developing a catch recording system. At all stages, the fishermen must buy into the program voluntarily and help to design their own rules. The strong community tradition of Bali has made this an easier process.
Both the local government and the resorts along the beach are supporting the MAC program, since it helps them monitor and maintain the natural resources that also attract tourism.
The Lilleys originally approached a village of 98 fishermen collecting along 2 kilometres of reef. But news about the program quickly spread along the coast, and other fishermen and local government officials approached MAC asking to be involved. The program now covers 24 kilometres of coast with 120 fishermen, and MAC hopes to eventually involve about 800 fishermen along the whole of the North Bali coast. If the aquarium fishermen learn to manage their own resources in North Bali, they could become conservation ambassadors to fishing communities around Indonesia.
They are not only learning to manage their fish stocks, but to collect more safely. Many of the fishermen have lost friends and relatives to diving accidents. One dive company based in Bali is providing dive safety training to them at no cost, and a dive table has been located which is easy for them to understand. Research is underway to locate the best kind of netting to capture reef fish and phase out the use of cyanide.
The Lilleys also work with the middlemen who buy fish from the collectors and sell them to the exporters. Because the middlemen play an integral role, they are being trained as coordinators and keep records of the catch in log books they design themselves.
The sequence of cooperation extends to 40 exporters in Bali who supply the aquarium trade, seven of whom have signed a statement of commitment to work toward a sustainable harvest.
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We have to be realistic about eventual certification,” says Ron. “There’s a long chain of people and activities between the Balinese fishermen and the fish tank in the suburban living room, but it has to begin somewhere.”
And it has begun. The seeds of awareness have been planted in hundreds of minds along that chain in Bali, including yours. So the next time you pause by an aquarium take a moment to wonder where the fish came from, send them a little blast of sympathy and tell them the Lilleys are on the case.
