Collecting wild fish (AKA sponsorship, Part 2)

[David_Koran at HQ02.USACE.ARMY.MIL]

EUROPEAN CONNECTION

Back in the AKA stone age times, about 1980, we used to get a tremendous
number of species from Europe as they were heavily involved in collecting.
A trip to Africa and back was less than $300-400 in airfare while it would
cost 5 or more times that to do the same from the states.  They also had a
pretty good network in place sometimes connections still existed from
colonial days for the French and Germans.  In addition, they also had a
system of breeders who would reproduce those fish collected which would then
be marketed to us and the Japanese to pay for future collecting trips.

While many Europeans still travel to Africa to collect, that network doesn't
much exist the way it once did.  During my trip to Germany last year I was
told that 9-11 jumped the price of air cargo 4-5 times making fish bred in
Germany terribly expensive for the Japanese market who had also taken steps
to establish their own network in many of the countries the wild fish had
previously been collected.  With a loss of market, raising fish in Europe
for sale elsewhere is not terribly profitable these days.

Another thing you never heard in the talks any of these collectors gave
stateside was they essentially had to smuggle their fish out of the
countries where they were collected.  While we have had fighting seemingly
throughout Africa in the last 25 years, many of the governments are
realizing the resource they have and will protect in country export over
allowing foreigners to exploit the trade.

For those of you who attended our convention this year what you saw with our
banquet speaker was a dedicated amatuer who is pursuing this passionately,
however, he is not commercially capturing fish.  While he pointed up success
he also indicated quite a number of failures.  What it points up is that
maybe the best expected success is to re-mine previously described
collecting locations.  I shudder to think of someone bringing back fish from
a previous spot (say RPC 78-19) and it gets a new number referencing the
collectors and date and suddenly we get the debate again about keeping the
strain separate so we don't cross subspecies!

Please don't construe this argument as expecting to get a "collecting
grant", I don't favor this proposal at all.  One discussion that I do favor
is understanding that in this "developing" "third world" you sort of satisfy
many of the concerns by working within the imposed system.  Fred Bitter had
talked to me about collecting in Peru but he pointed out how they had
"greased the skids" with equpment and grant monies with the University in
Lima so that they could ship fish out as scientific material.  Thomas Litz
pointed out that one of the Professors at the state university in
Montevideo, Uruguay would like to conduct some summer research/exploration
for new locations and/or species of Austrolebias and was looking for small
amounts of funding to pay for travel expenses to get to and from the sites
to the University, i.e., per diem expenses.  Here one is looking at only a
few hundred dollars with significant upside potential.  We don't necessarily
have a network like this established but maybe this is where the funds would
best be spent.

More to come,

Dave Koran


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