wow, this is turning the wrong way....
so..just because i am bored and feeling childish, i will attack those that will attack my reasoning.....
1) To those that think what i am about to do is just mean, DCR hit the nail on the head..... "A tank grown animal and a wild animal in captivity is wrong in every sense.... " if you own a tank with anything living, you baically plucked an animal from its natural environment and put it in a jail where it may or may not survive, and definitely will not live its whole life...... if you have ever done any diving, the first thing you notice is how large all the animals and corals are.... angel fish more than a foot and a half in length, sponges which are 3-4 feet wide and 4-5 feet tall, parrot fish over a foot in length, grouper in the 50-1000 lbs range (depending on species), corals that are usually 10-100 times in size than in an artifical tank...... the list goes on and on... but basically, the point is, whenever you take something and put it in your tank, you either stunt their growth, malnurish them, keep them in an environment that is well below their "normal" levels...
there is just no way to keep a tank otherwise.. the more we put into our tanks, the better off they will be......which would be equivenant to plucking one of you and putting you in a house... 100sq ft, or if your owner is rich, 1000sq ft... and then feed you at his discretion and constantly try to get your air around 19% oxygen so you can breath.. oh yeah... the CO2 filter just needed to be replaced, and you are suffocating, slowly, hoping that the damn filter will be replaced...... get my drift??
Now, as far as tank raised organisms.... just because they are tank raised doesnt mean much except for the fact that they will probably acclimate to your tank better... the fish, in a physiological sense and a mental sense, is the same... just like if some owner plucked two of you, and you made a baby so the owner can take the baby and put it in another tank, does not make it right... the baby may survive, but its life will not be the same if you just left the whole family in the wild...
2) we are part of the food chain. just because there are less fish in the sea dosnt necessarily mean we, as humans, are purposly killing our natural resources. Yeah, there are a few rogue people out there that like to kill, just to kill. but for the most part, the decrease in fish mean two things.... one, the fish are getting smarter and staying clear out of our way (you can see this over a length of time fishing... the fish are still there, but they just wont bite your bait because they learned to stay away from bait with a leader attached to it (try florocarbon leader... very good stuff), and the other reason is that in order to feed our ever growing population, we need to depleate our resources....... the fix to this is to decrease our population.... so if you are alive, and not a vegitarian, you are part of the problem.
3) Thankfully, the government has put in regulations to try and make sure that our resources are sustained. to give you an example, Snook is one of the tastiest fish in costal areas of florida. So tasty, they were near eradication. So a strict law was put in place... you can no longer buy or sell snook...so the only way you could eat them is catch them, or know someone who can catch them... the population came back a bit, but it wasnt enough... so they put in a two fish per day limit.... this helped alot, but they wanted it better... so they set a minimum size of 12 inches....... that still wasnt enough... well, to cut to the chase, the regulations now are a minimum of 26" and a max of 34" (any fish larger than 34" are females, and all females must go back)..... so in the last few years, the populations have increased tremedously... and its much easier to catch fish which are large enough to make any fisherman happy....... this has also worked for billfish (sailfish, marlin, swordfish have all made great comebacks and are continuing their path... pretty soon, catching a 1000lbs blue marlin will not be just stories of the past), grouper, jewfish, hogfish, tarpon, snapper, etc, etc.
4) If you noticed, i am the type of person to check on regulations before i go hunting. whether it be for fish, and now hopefully corals and inverts... i am not going to go for fish since most of the fish here will just eat my corals. but, there are regulations to ensure that the reef will be able to sustain itself. a 30 piece limit, and a limit on what you can take. Basically, you cannot take rock, hard corals, seafans, and a few other items. I did not read anything about taking sand from the floor, which is probably why they can sell "straight from the ocean floor" sand (we have plenty to go around)
5) and i really belive that if i do this myself, i will be saving our reefs rather than getting them from the store. Having something to put into my tank with a few hours lag time instead of days or weeks lag time has got to be better.
a) you have no idea how many corals and fish died in order to get one living one in your LFS display.
b) you have no idea how they were harvested (cyanide)
c) you have no idea if the harvisters are harvisting too many (depleating the reef to the point where it can no longer sustain itself)
So get a grip!
