Troubled Waters : Growing Popularity of Pet Tropical Fish Has Spawned an Environmental Crisis

There’s only one plausible explanation: The walking batfish was Mother Nature’s idea of a joke.

So ugly it’s endearing, the toadlike creature hovered at rock bottom, maneuvering itself on six gnarled appendages.

“You wonder what God had in mind,” remarked Rick Becktell, owner of Aquarium International in Westminster.

And for what possible reason did evolution precisely split the bicolor Royal Gramma fish’s beautiful exterior into half fuchsia, half gold?

To make you ooh and ah.

They make you smile. They make you appreciate nature’s artistic flare and infinite imagination.

They--the creatures from Earth’s mysterious underside--are the hottest pets on dry land.

Since the mid-’80s, sales of saltwater fish have more than doubled in the United States, with Southern California alone representing 15% of the billion-dollar-a-year industry.

“Over the past two years, fish stores have been popping up like yogurt shops on every street corner,” said Kevin Kerns, owner of ‘Tis Tropical Fish in Fountain Valley.

“It would be a conservative estimate to say that since ‘Tis opened 19 years ago, the number of fish stores in Orange County has multiplied fivefold.”

Freshwater aquariums--for goldfish, Oscars, guppies--have long been a staple in college dorms and children’s playrooms. But until recently, the jewels of the sea--which are generally more colorful and exquisite than their salt-free counterparts--have been considered too troublesome and expensive for a mass market.

Recent advances in aquarium technology have minimized the disadvantages: now saltwater fish can live longer and their glass houses are easier to clean.

“We’ve come to understand more about the ocean’s ecosystem and how to duplicate it in the aquarium,” said Raul Valentini, owner of Anaheim-based Fish By Design, an aquarium maintenance service.

“Saltwater fish have had the reputation of dying quickly, which discourages people from buying them. But now we have the sophistication and equipment to give them a longer life in captivity than they would have in the ocean.”

Some fish sellers have expressed concern about the number of fish caught.

In the Philippines, sodium cyanide poisoning is used to sedate the fish, making them easier to catch but at the same time contaminating coral reefs.

Consumers, however, seem to be unaware of the controversy.

High-income households are pushing up the popularity of saltwater fish.

After all, caring for blue-line triggers and Australian sea apples requires disposable income.

“My average saltwater aquarium fish buyer is a career-type person in his 30s or 40s who can afford to invest in this hobby,” said Bob Tetreault, manager of Russo’s World’s Largest Pet Store in Santa Ana. “I call them ‘yuppie pets.’ ”

“We have a special parking lot reserved for Beemers,” Kerns joked about his store, ‘Tis.

While many of the fish themselves cost under $20, the aquarium and filter system can run into the thousands. “It’s common for someone to spend $3,000 to $10,000 here on an aquarium,” Kerns said.

Hectic schedules and compact condominiums help to make contained pets sell swimmingly.

Roommates Tony Napoli, 26, and Mark Garcia, 30, decided that their Newport Beach duplex was too small for man’s best friend, so they opted for fish.

“They don’t smell, they don’t make noise,” said Napoli, a schoolteacher. “Dogs and cats run all over the place--they’re kind of like having children. Fish mind their own business, and they add beauty to your home.

“Once you get the fish, you want more fish and a bigger aquarium,” Napoli said. “It’s an addictive hobby.”

Garcia added that he “could just sit and stare at the fish tank for two or three hours straight. It’s very relaxing--the sound of bubbles in the tank, watching the fish move. I get a lot of gratification out of my fish. I can’t pick them up and hold them like I could a cat or a dog, but they’re still my little pets.”

“I go on a lot of business trips, and I can leave my fish for two or three days at a time without having to worry about them,” said Gary Brenkman, 35, a marketing consultant in Irvine. “You would have to board a dog or a cat.”

But San Juan Capistrano resident Mary Callahan, 32, warned that in the case of lengthy out-of-town excursions, fish can present more inconvenience than movable beasts.

“When we go on trips we can leave our golden retriever with a friend or at a kennel, but we have to arrange to have someone come to our house to feed our fish,” she said.

The homemaker admitted that she and her husband, Daniel, are more attached to their dog than to their fish. “Your fish don’t crawl up on the bed with you,” she said.

Even though they must be admired from afar, Callahan has developed an affinity for her finned friends. “Each fish has its own personality and temperament,” Callahan said. “I hate it when one dies.”

Condominium dweller Charlie Brooks, 40, a director of property management in San Juan Capistrano, has come to know her fish as individuals.

“I swear my dog-faced puffer is a manic-depressive,” she said. “Some days he’s real quiet and doesn’t move, and other days he’s playful and swimming every which direction. My fish are real characters.”

The store doors would not open for another 20 minutes, but already Mathew and Robert Slusarenko were waiting outside Fish 2000, a new store in Tustin.

“It’s so neat in there,” said an enthusiastic Robert, 8. “We like to look at the big fish in the big container. They’d keep growing and growing really, really big if they weren’t in that container.”

“Wow. I never knowed that before,” Mathew, 7, remarked on his brother’s knowledge of marine life.

The big fish the Yorba Linda boys talked about--the black tip, leopard, sand and horn sharks--are the main attraction at Fish 2000. The largest shark in the tank, a leopard shark, is 5 feet long.

Owner Tony Raz reels in a curious audience at 1 p.m. every Sunday when he presents a public feeding of his star specimens. He dons a wet suit and snorkeling gear and then--gutted trout in hand--cavorts with the sharks for about 30 minutes. It’s like a mini-Sea World show, with free admission.

By mutual agreement with Sea World, Raz will donate the sharks to the San Diego marine park when they outgrow their 6,000-gallon home.

Although they are Raz’s most eye-catching water babies, the sharks are only a small part of Fish 2000’s inventory of fresh and saltwater specimens.

Despite his stock that numbers in the thousands, he can barely keep up with customer demand in the store, which he and his wife, Rosaline, opened only four months ago.

“I thought it would take at least a year to get the store going, but business exploded almost from Day One,” Raz said in the store where walls remain half-painted, aquariums half-accessorized. “I figured we’d have time to finish the detail work in between customers, but we never have a spare moment. We’re working at least 13 hours a day.”

Israeli-born Raz and his British wife moved to Orange County last year from London, where they had operated a tropical fish store for 22 years.

“We had intended to start a restaurant or go into the clothing industry,” Raz said.

But the tropical fish business here was too good to pass up. “I think in two years you will see a lot of Fish 2000s,” Raz said confidently.

Beneath the surface, in the mesmerizing lure of exotic fish, lies a dark side to this story.

About 70% of the saltwater fish sold in American aquarium stores come from the shores of the Philippines, where they’re found in abundance. A large part of the fish are caught with the use of sodium cyanide--a deadly poison that weakens or kills sea life, destroys the islands’ coral reefs, and endangers the health of impoverished fish collectors who swim poisoned waters for dollar-a-day wages.

Steve Robinson, owner of Cortez Hand-Caught Mariners--an Inglewood-based aquarium fish wholesale store--is the United States’ leading advocate in a movement to eradicate cyanide fishing.

For the last two years, he has spent most of his time in the Philippines negotiating with government officials and organizing classes to teach fishermen a better way to capture fish.

His trips are sponsored by a grant from the Canadian government.

Robinson, field director for the International Marinelife Alliance, will return in a month to his mission in the Philippines.

An eloquent, amiably intense man, Robinson expounds on his cause with no-nonsense urgency. He states the issue simply: Aquarium stores that buy cyanide-caught fish are “accomplices to an immoral crime.”

For two decades, Filipinos have been herding fish with poison. This practice, which their government has ignored, is illegal worldwide.

Using plastic baby bottles, divers squirt their prey with diluted cyanide, which leaves the fish sedated and easy to capture.

“The fish come out of their crevice drunk, and you can catch them with your hands,” Robinson explained. “But it’s not just a crevice that you’ve squirted with poison--it’s a live coral head. It’s the ecosystem for thousands of organisms, and it has has taken 30 years to grow.

“At least 50% of fish caught this way die before they leave the Philippines. Others are so weak that the stress of shipping knocks them off. Others limp all the way to the customer with a stomach full of lesions. Some of the fish receive smaller doses and survive to live out a normal life span,” said Robinson.

Due to the Philippines’ low-paid labor, fish that come from the area are cheaper than drug-free, net-caught fish from Hawaii, Australia and other parts of the world.

Both wholesalers and retailers buy and sell mass quantities of cyanide-caught fish to maintain competitive prices.

The newfound fish boom has accelerated the need to catch more fish, adding to the environmental catastrophe.

“With saltwater fish, you’re not making the product, you’re taking it,” Robinson said. “Just because we want all the angelfish in the coral reef doesn’t mean that the coral reef can produce them fast enough to keep up with everyone’s ambitions.

“You can create as many domestically bred (freshwater) fish as you want, but saltwater fish have different dynamics at work. They don’t lay their eggs on rocks. They spray their eggs into the currents. The eggs may drift for two weeks before they land (on a stationary surface). Humans cannot duplicate that process in an aquarium--the filter would suck up the eggs,” Robinson said.

Fish are vulnerable to mistreatment because, he said, they “suffer from a lack of charisma.”

“Warm things with fuzzy muzzles have a lot of charisma,” Robinson said. “But fish feel pain, too--they just don’t show terror in their eyes.”

Becktell of Aquarium International expressed the same sentiment: “Fish die quietly.”

“To a lot of people, a fish is not a live animal because it doesn’t bark or meow. Customers come in and say, ‘Hey, you know that yellow fish? It died. Sell me another’--as if it were just a piece of merchandise,” Becktell said.

Aquarium International is one of the few retailers in Orange County that refuses cyanide-caught fish. If other stores would follow suit, Becktell claimed, the move would boost rather than hinder business.

“Most people are in and out of the (saltwater fish) hobby in 90 days,” he said. “They become disenchanted after their fish all die--often because the fish came from the Philippines with strikes against them. It’s much more productive to keep customers in the hobby so that they’ll keep coming back for more equipment and more fish.”

Cyanide-caught fish that don’t make it offer the public the misperception that all saltwater fish are fragile creatures.

“Fish undergo the stress of being caught on the reef and then traveling across the world in a bag. Humans wouldn’t survive for a day under those conditions,” Becktell argued. “How can people say that fish aren’t hardy? I have a pair of African cichlids at home who have lived for 8 years.”

Most casual hobbyists know little about how their fish got from the ocean to their tank. Owners Brenkman, Brooks, Callahan, Napoli and Garcia all said that they had not heard about cyanide poisoning.

They only know one side to this fish story.