Cover Story : Preserving the Balance

Thirty feet underwater off the shore of Catalina Island, a diving class opened a sea urchin, luring dozens of bright orange Garibaldi to their fingertips.

“They will swim right up and eat from your hand, and then even follow you around,” said Redondo Beach dive-shop owner Barry Friedman.

This was the rite of passage that Friedman recalls most vividly from his inaugural plunge 25 years ago. He went on to become a diving instructor himself, and through the years he has made sure that hundreds of students got the same experience.

The trusting and curious Garibaldi are also easy targets for another kind of diver: commercial aquarium collectors. Whereas sports divers just sightsee, the collectors capture the fish and sell them to aquarium dealers.

Friedman and other divers say that because of overharvesting, Garibaldis have dwindled in many of Catalina’s most popular reefs and coves. No one knows how many Garibaldis used to swim area waters--or even how many there are now. In fact, the state Department of Fish and Game has not studied the Garibaldi population. But sports divers are convinced the numbers have plummeted.

Professional collectors, however, call the divers’ claims unproven and inflammatory. All the evidence to support the claims are anecdotal, they say.

Still, sports divers have some support from scientists. Paul Sikkel, who was doing his doctoral dissertation on the Garibaldi’s mating habits, observed divers collecting about 40 adult Garibaldi from a reef off Lion Head on Catalina Island in the spring of 1990. “This can constitute the entire population of resident adults on some reefs,” he said.

Two years later, the reef’s population of Garibaldis was not half what it had been, he said.

“That was the biggest eye-opener,” said Sikkel, now a researcher at Friday Harbor Laboratories in Washington state. “The concern is their vulnerability. They are so easy to catch, and (their habitat) is in close proximity to Los Angeles.”

Having already won some limits on the collection of Garibaldis, sports divers have launched a petition campaign to place a six-year moratorium on the practice. The divers and manufacturers of diving equipment formed an environmental group called Ocean Futures to curtail the collection of the fish.

And, in a symbolic gesture to one of California’s brightest water creatures, they also want to declare the Garibaldi the state marine fish. Rep. Bill Morrow (R-Carlsbad) introduced the proposal last month.

The feisty fish, named for an Italian general who wore garish tunics, has been such a common site in California waters that many sports fishermen assumed it already was the state fish--and therefore off limits. Even the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium once listed it as the state fish in one of its exhibits. (The state fish is the golden trout, found in California’s fresh waters).

On Catalina Island, tourists getting off ferries often clog gangways because they have spotted Garibaldis in shallow waters at Avalon Bay. But that area is a state-designated protected habitat.

Garibaldis can be found from Magdalena Bay in Baja California north to Monterey Bay. But Catalina had been a popular collecting spot because it is more accessible than other Channel Islands, including Santa Cruz, San Clemente and Santa Barbara islands.

If Ocean Futures succeeds in protecting the Garibaldi in California waters, the sports divers plan to do the same for other marine life popular with aquarium owners, including the blue-banded Catalina goby and the horn and leopard sharks. The effort is part of a larger movement to limit the $3-billion-a-year worldwide aquarium trade.

“They are trying to (restrict) fish all over the world,” said Lek Bunya-ananta, a wholesaler who buys fish from collectors and sells them to retail outlets. “But they can’t. Too many people make a living at it, and it is a pretty large hobby. It would be tough to stop.”

The Garibaldi is still a very small part of the 20,000 types of species collected. Fewer than 500 Garibaldis were collected off the California coast last year, according to the state Department of Fish and Game. But those numbers are considered sketchy because 1993 was the first year that collectors were required by the state to report their catch.

Sports divers, who make a living by leading underwater tourists down to the fish, have pushed for limits on the collection of Garibaldis because they fear their business will lose its Technicolor appeal.

“Here we have this tropical-colored fish in temperate waters,” said John Hardy, owner of a Catalina Island dive shop and president of the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s well-recognized, seen by everyone. You can’t say that this one business kills this one animal, but anything that detracts from the environment makes it less desirable to go diving.” But professional collectors in California have been fighting back. And recent state laws, collectors say, already severely restrict their business.

“The situation is not nearly as critical as they make it out to be,” said Victor La Fontaine, a Granada Hills diver who owns an aquarium-fish collecting business. “(The Garibaldi) is an abundant species.”

Besides, he said, he and other collectors have an interest in keeping it that way.

“It’s not like I’m going out there and poking them with a spear gun,” he said. “It’s not like we are taking these and they are being eaten. These are pets.”

On Catalina Island, glass-bottom boat operators have long counted on the Garibaldi to wow tourists. In the 1950s, Garibaldis had become popular in spearfishing. Island residents credit boat operators, who feared a loss of tourism, for successfully lobbying the state to ban the Garibaldi from the sport.

It was not until an accident three years ago, however, that Catalina divers, merchants and boat operators discovered that fish were still being taken from the waters.

In 1991, a commercial diver on La Fontaine’s boat drowned in Isthmus Cove when his air supply ran out 73 feet below the surface. The diver, Kenneth W. Howard, made as much as $654 per day capturing infant red-gold Garibaldis, baby sharks and other marine life.

Since then sports divers have blamed collectors for the smaller number of Garibaldis near many Catalina reefs, said Harry Pecorelli, a retired engineer and former president of Catalina Conservancy Divers, an environmental group.

Records showed that a week before he died, Howard was diving for Garibaldis and stingrays, selling them for $5 to $7 each.

“This was a problem that we thought was only happening in the Third World, but it was occurring in our own back yard,” said Jim Hall, who is leading the Ocean Futures petition drive.

In fact, it had been going on for years. California Diving News Editor Dale Sheckler, who made a living capturing fish for aquariums in the late 1970s, said he used a slurp gun, which would suck a fish into a tube.

“We could clear out an area the size of a small house,” he said. “But there were only two collectors doing it.”

By the late 1980s, collectors started using large, vacuum-like hoses, “which suck anything and everything, even the tiny invertebrates,” he said.

For Gerald Felando, then an assemblyman from Torrance, and other state lawmakers, such anecdotes were enough to persuade them to take action. They passed a bill in 1992 requiring collectors and wholesalers to buy special licenses, which cost from $330 to $1,000 annually.

Last year, in a bill authored by Assemblyman Dan Hauser (D-Eureka), Garibaldi collection was restricted to November, December and January. In addition, all of Catalina Island was declared off limits to aquarium collectors, although the back side of the island is scheduled to be opened up again in 2000.

Collectors, however, have moved on to San Clemente Island, another of the Channel Islands, south of Catalina.

According to the state Department of Fish and Game, 108.25 pounds, or 462 Garibaldis, were caught legally by aquarium collectors in 1993. A total of 104 aquarium collectors permits were issued in 1993.

Collectors still have no limits on how many Garibaldis they may catch, and they are free to take both adults and juveniles, Hall said.

The Garibaldis are extremely territorial, so if a collector takes a fish from one reef, there’s no guarantee that another Garibaldi will make the same spot home, he said.

“Unlimited take of adults and juveniles spells disaster for the population,” he said. “There’s nothing to repopulate the species.”

The proposed moratorium until 2000, Hall said, would give Catalina Conservancy Divers enough time to come up with money and conduct a thorough study of the effects of aquarium collecting on the Garibaldi population. The group envisions a $150,000 project that would take up to six years to complete.

The new restrictions, wholesalers and aquarium collectors say, could drive them out of business.

“I’m barely making payments on my truck and my insurance,” La Fontaine said. “My lawyer owns my boat. Very little by little, they took so many things away that I’m struggling.”

La Fontaine declined to say how many fish he collected last year, but disputed the notion that he was collecting the fish en masse .

“I may have 20 in front of me, but I take only two,” he said. “If I took 100 or 200, I would have them for two to three weeks. I got better things to do than transport fish. It’s a limited market.”

And Garibaldis are not an easy fish to keep in a tank. They can live 10 years in the sea, but they require cold water to survive, said Will Borgeson, an aquaculture expert at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. A Garibaldi needs a 100-gallon tank, double or even triple the size of most home aquariums.

“If you have more than one Garibaldi in a small tank, one becomes boss, and bullies all the other fish,” Borgeson said. “That’s their nature. They’re basically pretty rotten aquarium fish.”

By the late 1980s, as larger aquariums grew in popularity, more people were willing to set up cold-water tanks. Garibaldi-collecting became most popular in Japan and China, where enthusiasts wanted to re-create California’s marine life in their living rooms, he said.

“It’s an extremely beautiful fish,” Borgeson said. “. . in China, their gold color means long life.”

Overseas hobbyists, however, are paying a premium. They spend as much as $125 on one fish, including the cost of shipping, according to Inglewood wholesaler Bunya-ananta, owner of Aquatic Depot.

From his nondescript warehouse, hundreds of tropical and freshwater fish are shipped around the world. In 1993 he bought about 150 Garibaldis from collectors for $8 to $10 and sold them for $25, he said.

Bunya-ananta, who started in the retail fish business 27 years ago, doubts the Garibaldi population is shrinking. But he acknowledged that the fish have a shorter life span in captivity.

“Live tropical fish, they die pretty fast,” he said. “A retail store can make good business replacing them. If they last three, four, five years, you’re lucky.”

The Garibaldi FAMILY: The Garibaldi is a member of the damsel family, which include small, shallow water marine fish that have a round to oval, compressed body. Most damsel fish are found in tropical seas, but the Garibaldi is one of the few in temperate waters.

TERRITORY: Monterey Bay to Baja, including the Channel Islands, off the California coast.

HABITAT: Clear water, often near crevices and small caves, occasionally in kelp.

ORIGIN OF NAME: From Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), who led movement to unify the country and wore garish outfits.

COLOR: Adults are bright orange. Juveniles are reddish orange with electric blue spots. The spots--a signal to adults not to chase their young away--disappear after the juveniles grow to 6 to 8 inches long.

MATING: A male Garibaldi creates a nest of algae, then invites a female to join him. She lays up to 80,000 eggs, and the male fertilizes them. He chases her away and stays to guard the nest.

STATE REGULATIONS: In sportfishing, illegal to spear or retain. Commercial divers may catch with a marine aquarium collectors permit. No collecting is allowed on the north side of Catalina Island, and the back side is off limits until 2000.

Source: The Cousteau Society, state Department of Fish & Game