So I came across an article today...

[HeavyHittah]

...talking about the collection of live rock in fiji. And how they are starting petitions to stop the harvesting of live rock here. Anyone else heard of this?? what about marshal's island live rock, is it the same thing going on there to?? whats the best looking live rock you came across,and where did it come from??

[yote]

http://tampabaysaltwater.com/
This is the best rock I've seen.Its maricultured off the coast of Flordia.
I got about 40lbs of that and another 40 of Fiji in my 75.
My next tank will be all Tampabay rock.

[Bifferwine]

Not all live rock is wild-harvested, like Yote said, you can find sources that are harvested ethically. You can also buy totally synthetic live rock that is very high quality.

[sen5241b]

Tampa Bay Salt Water has eco-LR and they're great.

They lease a tract of sea bottom in the Gulf of Mexico and aqua-culture the rock there. I've had all kinds of great hitch hikers come in on it and lots of nice purple coralline algae. They ship it in water to keep it from getting a die off.

Its nice to know your LR came from an ecologically aware supplier.

http://coastguardnews.com/florida-ma...ng/2007/12/20/

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/fls/PressR...070323-02.html

[Bifferwine]

It's a shame when stuff like that happens. My LFS is very picky about their suppliers and he's told me stories about people poaching ricordea off the coast of Florida in the middle of the night, when they are less likely to be caught. Unfortunately, these people never seem to get any significant jail time or fines.

[RyanG]

Nice Probation and a fine in both cases, you can get worse punishment for dine and dash in most states and thats just a free meal.

[fatman]

It is very hard to convince poor and starving persons who can make what seems like a fortune to them to ethically harvest live rock, and there are many unethical first world countries willing to send buyers overseas to convince them to plunder their reefs. We obviously could not get fat well fed americans to ethically harvest florida live rock. That is why there are now aquaculture sites growng live rock in florida, because we could not ethically control or greed. There are now four of them, two of them which are doing very well. The other two were both wiped out twice by hurricanes. It is very likely that the harvest of Fiji rock will eventually be halted. It is likely that the wild harvesting of live rock will be stopped every where eventually. Who knows when though. There were thousands of tons of Florida wild live rock harvested in just a few years before it was halted. Very, very little of that live rock is probably still in use in aquariums, even though it was harvested for marine aquariums and bought by marine. Unfortunately a lot of people do not stay in the hobby once entering it, and its is doubtful most people going out of the hobby search for good homes for their live rock when the get out of the hobby. There are also a lot of home aquarists that now run base rock through their tanks and sell it later as live rock. Some put a few frags on the rock and some just wait for coraline to populate it before selling it.

[Damseluver]

Momma always said; "don't throw away your under gravel filter someday it will come back in style". Forrest Gump when making the change from his freshwater tank to SW.

Point is I wouldn't worry to much about the availability of LR. Trends and methods come and go in this hobby and sometimes even cycle back around to what we were doing 15 years ago. Most recent example is trend of watching out for "over skimming". And now you tell me, I just bought a six foot tall 15 hundred dollar skimmer. The good news is they came out with a 175 dollar attachement to address this issue.

Suspiciously most of these trends are of the "spend more money" variety. It does not take much detective work to figure out who is pushing that kind of advice.

They told me 2 pounds per gallon LR. Only problem now is I have to introduce fish to the tank using a shoe horn. This cant be right.

[yote]

Thats one thing that I get PISSEDover.Even the goverment dont care enough about wildlife to to lay down stiff enough penalties to make a poacher at least think twice.
The dude wasnt a poor man trying to make a living.If he was,he couldnt have afforded the boat and fuel.
Guess thats why I'm not a judge.I'd have fined him $125,000. for each pound of rock,and another $100,000. for each coral,with a 75 year sentence in the federal pen.

[Bifferwine]

It's unfortunate that the penalties are not stiff enough to deter people. Same goes with another situation that I had to go through recently, someone abused one of my dogs several weeks ago while NoobDeBiff and I were at work. Ended up cutting a chunk of her leg off, 5 inches by 5 inches in size. She had to be taken to the emergency vet and had over $1000 and six hours worth of emergency surgery.

The vet was dumbfounded as to how this could have happened, and suspected it was a person, as her leg was not bitten or torn, or anything like that, it appeared to have been cut. And NoobDeBiff did not find the chunk of flesh, any fur or any blood anywhere in our yard. To top it off, around the same time, I received an anonymous letter threatening my dogs (neither of them are aggressive and neither of them bark. One of my neighbors commented that she didn't even know I had dogs when I asked her if she had seen anything suspicious going on that day).

I consulted a lawyer, and she advised me to file a police report and call animal control, but they wouldn't even do that for me, this was not an issue that was worth addressing to them. It's just too easy for people to get away with stuff like this (and the illegal harvesting of wild animals) when there seems to be no punishment (or in my dog's case, even investigation) for the perpetrators.