![]() ![]() On this particular day, she was preparing 60 yellow tangs-hand-caught with nets from a reef off Hawaii’s Big Island, flown from Kona to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Miami, quarantined for five days at her shop, and then packed in plastic bags and boxes-to be flown by Aeroflot to Moscow, where they’d be sold in fish stores.Ĭoncerns about the overcollection of many fish species arise from the fact that the aquarium trade is largely untraceable. She ships marine life collected from all over the country and around the globe to as far away as Germany, Japan, Russia, and South Africa. Stockhausen, who has a reputation for ethical standards and practices, is one of a few licensed wholesalers in the Miami area. Operation Rock Bottom is one of the biggest law enforcement attempts to crack down on illegal marine-life crime in the nation’s history. That’s partly because large-scale aquaculture requires costly facilities giving round-the-clock care to hundreds of thousands of animals with very specific needs. Only a small percentage of additional commercially available marine fish are captive bred, mostly variations of popular clownfish, gobies, dottybacks, blennies, and certain corals. No one knows exactly how many marine animals are sold on the black market, but some experts estimate that 10 to 30 percent of marine animals in stores have been caught illegally with cyanide. Nearly 3,000 saltwater species, including fish and invertebrates, displayed in tanks are captured from the wild, predominantly in Indonesia and the Philippines, where harmful chemicals such as cyanide are sometimes used illegally to stun the animals for easy collecting. In the United States, which accounts for roughly half of those-more than any other country-an estimated 2.5 million households own saltwater fish. More than 20 million marine fish from about 45 countries are imported each year for the worldwide aquarium trade. ![]() When Stockhausen opened the company, in 2006, she tapped into a multimillion-dollar a year global business supplying aquariums ranging from tiny tanks in dorm rooms to giant displays like the 1.2-million-gallon Open Sea exhibit at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium. “One weekend I would go to all the fish stores north of me,” she said, “and the next I’d go to all the fish stores south of me.”Īfter befriending some commercial divers collecting wild tropical fish in the Florida Keys, she had an epiphany: “I can do this for a living,” she said, beneath the blue glow of UV lights illuminating hundreds of soft corals in psychedelic shades and patterns at her wholesale business, Exotic Sealife International, in Miami. ![]() She constantly thought about how to grow her collection. With dark wood trim and a decorated interior, it was filled with dozens of flashy inhabitants, including a brilliant yellow tang, fluorescent royal grammas, cute little striped clownfish, live anemones, and mushroom corals. Within 16 months of adopting her grouper in 2004, Stockhausen had upgraded from a 50-gallon saltwater tank to a 90-gallon tank to a 180-gallon tank to a giant 250-gallon acrylic case as big as a horse set center stage in her living room. She was going to need another tank-and soon another, and then another. “I sat in front of the tank and thought, I can’t put anything else in there-he’ll eat it,” she said, laughing. ![]()
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