Abide By The Laws & Rules
Learn the fishing laws set down by the state or country you live in and abide by them! NEVER use any chemicals or drugs for catching fish.
As commercial ornamental marine fish collectors in Hawai'i we are required to have a commercial fishing license, as well as an Aquarium Permit. We follow the Hawai'i Fishing Laws for size limitations and taking of certain fishes, and use only legal nets and other equipment.
In Hawai'i, the fish listed for size limitations are considered food fishes for local sustenance. Did you know that Manini (Convict Tangs) are only to be collected at five inches or more in size, Parrot Fish should be a one pound minimum weight, and Goat Fish species (Moana, Kumu, Weke and Oama) have a seven inch minimum size limit? Even though these fishes are considered food fishes in Hawai'i, they are of interest to aquarists in smaller sizes. If you see a fish store or supplier that offers size regulated fishes for sale, inquire with them why and how they are allowed to do so. Maybe they are not aware of this, or for some reason they have some type of special authorization to sell them.
Voluntary Fish Regulation
You can choose to go out and collect everything and anything you can get your hands on, no matter what, or you can choose to regulate certain species on your own. We know that in our farm area certain species are not abundant, but we can find some numbers of them in certain places on the reef. We CHOOSE to tell customers that want a large quantity of certain fishes that they cannot have them.
A few examples, we seldom find small or medium sized Achilles Tangs and find the large and extra large size in pretty good numbers, but only in four particular spots on the reef where we dive. For someone that orders 30 L/XL Achilles we say "we'll send you no more than 10". For the harder to find or less abundant fishes, you'll be lucky to get one or two from us, if any at all.
We have had people want nothing but an LD3 container of Yellow Tangs. You're talking about 600 fish! No way! If we did this for every person that wanted it we would over fish and deplete our Yellow Tang supply in a very short period of time. We regulate no more than 200 Yellow Tang in a container. The rest of the order is to be filled with a complete "variety" of all the other fish we collect. By collecting this way you harvest fish in a balanced manner, not just taking one species from the reef, but you also want to be sure not to ship a bunch of "junk" fish that your customer cannot sell. This wastes fish that are better off left in the ocean.
We also do not like to remove large quantities of the large and extra large sized fish. These are your breeding stock and are the fish that help restock our ocean waters.
Be aware of the fish you are selling. Choose not to ship fish that do not do well in captivity. Just say NO! For years we had Cleaner Wrasses on our price list, and a couple of years ago we removed it from the list. These little fish provide a valuable service on the reef and do not do well in captivity. There are some Butterfly Fishes that are very delicate and hard to keep. These we choose to only collect on occasion and ship them to experienced suppliers and aquarist.
Keep Good Records
Believe it or not, we have a log book with diagrams for every spot we dive in our farm from one end to the other. Each time we collect we note how many dives we did, how many and what fish we collected. We have kept this log since we began our fish collecting business in 1989, so you can imagine it's quite a collection of reef observation and fish collecting information. We also make any special notes of something we may have seen out of the ordinary for a particular spot, maybe a fish we have not seen in that area before, etc. It not only holds all this vital information, we know when and where to go in our farm area to collect.
