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Re: Wild killies from whole sellers? Ethical?
David,
I've had a few debates about this one, as a friend imports tropical fish
and sometimes gets killies. I would not want to see a killie industry
develop, but I don't think there's a big ethical question about buying
wild fish. Generally, killies in shipments are mixers.
Every collector or exporter is another predator in the killie habitat,
and once a few normani, chaytori or annulatus come to North America,
they are the living dead as far as their natural life goes. But they are
living, and should be kept that way. I'd say go for it.
To distinguish importations (I've seen two distinct looking annulatus
over the last few years) I put CI (Commercial Import) country (G for
Guinea), year and month. At one point we had a lot of Nigerian fish
coming, and every bag of dwarf cichlids had four or five bedraggled
biteniatum hoping against hope nothing was going to see and eat them.
Every little group was a bit different, so as pretentious as it might
seem, in one year the july fish (long finned) was different from the
november ones (a stocky short finned biteniatum), hence the month
designation. It's a shaky, possibly invalid system, and both have since
been lost anyway, but you can only try.
-Gary Elson
> David Lains wrote:
>
> Is there a general consensus as to obtaining wild killies imported to
> wholesalers? I purchased a pair in LA and have been questioning the
> ethics of it. I've wanted to play with Epi annulatus for a while and
> now I can get wild ones, should I? There are a few others Aplo
> normani and Aphy chaytori that look interesting but is it ethical? If
> so do you give them some sort of Import code similar to a collection
> code? You couldn't pin down a location but if they were imported
> together they would likely come from similar area.
>
> Tanks
> David
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