What countries are Asian Arowanas still Illegal

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Schneider;3420410; said:
Is this a pair bonding species? Definiterly not a cichlid. I seriously doubt it would cost a couple of million to accomplish. Food tends to be cheaper per unit if you are willing to buy bulk. Asian breeders still use ponds which I am sure are drastically different than the natural habitat of this fish. Believe it or not, some people in this country actually generate theit own power. I think you just don't desire the US to compete with the Asian breeding farms. The best way to protect wild stocks is to produce captive bred stocks. Hawaii stays nice and warm all year. It is part of the US, so outdoor ponds may even be possible. Asian breeders had to take some of the risks you speak of. How did they afford to feed their fish? You seem to think the entire US is one giant freezer. I still think a breeding operation could be feasible and cost effective in the US.
A VERY picky pair bonding species. Its happened before, a pond of 30, and no pairs formed after a couple years. Generate their own power to run a couple ponds and filters? Thats ALOT of energy. Im all in for everyone getting to own arowanas, but this is just not the way to go. You cannot recreate climate conditions if you have outdoor ponds, thus you would need indoor ponds. Do a bit of research on the breeding of aros before you start thinking a breeding program in the US will work.
 
I think if the USA legalized Asian Arowanas more Arowana farms would be formed in Asia to supply the huge and expensive demand for the market (just way to profitable to be ignored) in the USA.

If someone passionate enough and with the resources here in the states decides to attempt to breed Asian Arowanas. I think it could be done, just for optimum breeding, your going to find that first from South East Asian farms.
 
sostoudt;3419934; said:
it actually was a very good comparision, the black market for fish will be their for the fish no matter what, its just the honest people that miss out.

and actually cites allows you to own the fish legally, if purchased from a cites recognized breeder, so you could say cites decided for controlled sale just like the FDA does for pain killers.

its actually the EPA that prevents the sale of any asian arowana, even those from cites breeding programs. and this is what people want the fish removed from. removing from EPA wouldnt effect the cites restrictions in place.

so to reinterate it was a very good comparision.
You can reinterate all you want ...EPA is not concerned about rare,, soon to be extinct fish being overcollected in some far off land,thats where CITES comes in and it does not matter what breeder you get them from we cant buy them.You mentioning pain killers has nothing to do with a fish that does not breed regularly enough to keep up with the ammount of collection that would occur should the current situation change.
 
australia wont allow them because they do no recognise how hard it is to breed. how expensive they are and so that they wont be released enough times to establish. they place super little risk to aussie waters, even gov papers point this out.. certainly not enough risk to be considered noxious under the context of their own laws and requirements!. the aussie law can and would be succesffully changed if somone took the time and got enough proof together AND had willing assistance from the people that work for the gov.
l the government guys showed that they are hopeless at their jobs, didnt care to follow their own guidelines or didnt understand why they had such guidleines. pen pushers i suspect with little knowledge of what makes for a fish to be noxious.
the process needs attention.
if they could breed here fisheries and the gov should by all means allow breeding here. its a tropical breeding fish but worth big money to industry. it fits the bill allright.
establish. the chances of them establishing are super low and even the fisheries scientists know this. they also know that they wont hybridise.
they would never be a runaway species due to lack of numbers of offspring. its really simple and the reasons are there to allow it but you cant get this through gov departments heads.
the USA is dfferent in that they wont allow for it being on endangerd list. full stop.

prohibition always leads to black markets. cites did this to allow trade. this is like the black drug market. they raided shops. killed fish and a week later there were fish back in the shops. this shows what they are up againnst, stupid thing is they are wasting tax money on non threatening fish. as for the pain killer anology it is similar enough to mention.
it causes massive problems while they only capture less than ten percent of the drugs each year and the dealers just replace it and the dealers get tougher and tougher and bring guns and everything. look at mexico. an insatiable US demand...people are killed by the thousands. more than waht drugs ever kills. the the gov wonders why this is happeneing. take prescriptions as well of course people will abuse. so what. you cant help this stuff. people like things and some people like things they arent allowed to have, even if they add penalty consequences stop people, on top of the original risk a substance places on someone you still get people breaking the law. add some big money into the equation for black market drugs or fish and im afraid its a lost war.
after decades of war on prohibition nothin has changed except the amount of money they take from your tax to feed the cops to do nothing at all that is effective. but their minds are closed to this way of thinking. arowana in aus or the us and such a bad thing.
one day there may be enough production, when they produce enough in asia. they will keep expanding. they should allow breeding in the USA and australia. it culd be done. costly yes. way more than in the original areas. but the money is there to pay it back.
indoor will be done. some companies in asia are going to be doing hormonal breeding in the future by selecting pairs for traits and not relying on natural pairing. with the right water and light periods and food and techniques it will work. its a matter of time.
 
krichardson;3422713; said:
You can reinterate all you want ...EPA is not concerned about rare,, soon to be extinct fish being overcollected in some far off land,thats where CITES comes in and it does not matter what breeder you get them from we cant buy them.You mentioning pain killers has nothing to do with a fish that does not breed regularly enough to keep up with the ammount of collection that would occur should the current situation change.
:ROFL:read my comment again. CITES has certified breeders to sell the fish to countries that are part of CITES.
you couldnt be more wrong. like i said if you actually read my comment. the EPA bans the fish in the US, Not CITES. CITES allows its sale, thats why canada and the uk can have the fish.

if your trolling:
kid go somewhere else, as this topic has been trolled to death

ill be nice and not make fun of you any more, as ive misread comments before too. but try to research topics before debating or even trolling.;)
 
the US wont lift the ban unless it can be proved they arent endangered. there is some people thinking that they should not have fit under this endangered category as lots of hard to reach rivers were not checked for populations.
not many people doubt that in many rivers they are near gone - and poaching still occurs.
there has been no new work on species counts being done to my knowledge and so no reviews on this for some time. CITES could and might allow trade on limited numbers if the US or AU went forward with lifting their bans.

however i doubt wild local numbers will come up more than before. due to continued poaching and river and land degradation. so unless it can be proved that the last estimates/endagered fish were wrong then it will likley stay this way. even then i dont see them flinching to the point they allow trade in the US. one thing though is many companies in asian wish the ban to be lifted. competition will get tighter and tighter later on and unless demand goes up steadily along with output numbers then the prices and so the profits will come down.

in the US, unless it is reasoned that this law goes againt cites of which the US is signed to and they change that outdated thought/law to reflect this it will reamain banned.
just because the US or australia ( there are some other countries that enforce bans too) are signed to CITES does not mean they have to allow trade. the US still have the act/law that says if a species is endagered then there shall be no trade, even though that law was made many years ago that still stops even restricted trade despite cites doing what they did.

one need remember it would still be restricted to tagged fish and it is REGULATED and CITES even looks into all relevent things as well before granting permits/licenses. i do not understand why there is not a big balck market in the US already. only maybe that they are not so well known there.

for it to happen in Australia its a different process to make legal and is quiet possible. the last time someone applied in AU it was canned on the wrong reasoning. then it was motioned again under a new ornamental fish policy process but because they had rejected under the other process two years prior, the commitee on this new board was advised to skip arowana because the risk assessment processes had been done before- even though it was not done properly or fairly with all the relevent info.
an application was made, it was displayed to relevent organisations and so some objections were put forth and then a ministers descision was made. that descision being to keep them banned from import.
i did not see any appeal put forth by the applicant to cover the objections despite the process allowing for that.
this would have been absolutley critical and a correctly written appeal could have won this over.
im afraid this is why i believe they are still banned here in AU.
the funny thing was this newer process was designed to use any newer relevent scientific or other material in the review. meaning these issues could have been properly adressed right here as well.
for example we now know that the different species from separate countries does not interbreed even in captive farm ponds..and there is evidence the species have not been bred outside the equatorial climate zone.. ( i am not talking green arowanas in this application as they are more easy to breed) and there is evidence that there have been release events (other than those released in that specific climate zone) that have never made for wild established populations.
now all these things were determined by scientists to be relevent as part of the process to determine if a fish species poses a great risk to the environment.

the first time they rejected for example they stood it down due to an objection by an environmental group that figured a) that hybridisation was a concern.. but now our own scientists know that far distant species arent a high risk to hybridize and that no cross breeding has occured beyond the asian species. the objection also claimed the species will harm native species..now one would think this would be the case on first inspection but it is the level of hamr and the risk it poses that is to be identified.
well this should also be adressed by the fact that no release events led to a wild population..and that they would be unlikley to thrive let alone establish if released in low numbers. the science says this!!
and yet even now we breed and and stock our own native saratoga/leis into rivers and dams all through QLD where other fish live without the same concerns.. and thats the very places/climate they are so worried about.

even in those places with a species that evolved here (saratoga) and can breed readily in our climate the numbers in those release areas still remains low due to the very breeding biology of this kind of fish. in fact we have a bag limit of 1 saratoga fish per angler in place because our government recognises the species does not do well with such human pressures.
it is part of the process to determine how much it would cost to remove fish from a river and how far reaching the population would be. now it is said by the scientists that large predatory fish are the easiest to control!!
so how they can turn around and say arowana is a noxious species worthy of banning and confiscating is beyond me. but like i say they do not see it this way and seem to have disregarded the science behind all this, well there is that but there is also the idea that no one has been able to produce the goods so to speak to make this fish legal. ie no appeal, then the skipping of this species under the latest review..

there was the main objection that it would become a wild species. they claimed that people would let them go if they attacked tank mates..and that if someone wanted a nasty fish they could get a saroatoga.
well, this is determined by the risk process too and i can tell you that under this process it is suposed to look at the number of likley release events. ( who would do that with a 3 grand prize fish if it did eat their oscar) i imagine a disgruntled arowana owner would sell it before they let it go- that is if they were not aware the fish was aggressive before they forked out 3 grand to stick it in a community tank..

so the process is sposed to look at the number of offspring produced if breeding does occur in a wild river ( fecundity is low not high) and the time to breeding age ( many years not months like guppies) and also how much does it cost to clean up if they get out and also how much money is the species worth to trade/industry and does this profit outweigh the slight? risks.

clearly this fish should be allowed in AU for breeding and for trade with certain restrictions in place. ie CITES licensing.

there is even talk that noxious fish in QLD (any that are already here) could have a special permit issued in the near future, so to be allowed. all these new laws should be finalised in around a year.

someone mentioned you can keep them in australia if you can prove they werent illegally imported... and true it is. lately they have only taken tagged fish that they can prove were illegally imported with a swipe of a tag scanner. i guess it is too hard to bother taking the fish without a tag because of the difficulty arising in court over proof.
however there is still the reverse onus principle which means it is up to the owner to prove the fish came into the country legally or the fish was an offspring from a legally entered fish. the thing here is they cant be legally traded anyways and no one has bred them here so its a bit hard to prove in court without documented proof ( old import papers) or even gene tests that can lead to these supposed legal parents. if someone has these "legal" imported parents they would be worth some extra dollars i tell ya.

in australia no aquaculture farms can get a permit to breed fish that arent allowed to be imported. i think currently if someone did breed some legal pair then the offsrping could be swapped or gifted but not for cash. this may change in the near future too and some have said the new rules may mean that backyarders might be able to sell fish as long as the culture volume is less than 10,000 litres but my view is that this practise will arise too many environmental issues to become law as these operators wont be under the same restrictions as licensed farms so if this happens i think it will still be on a trade/swap/gift basis and probably no cash- meaning no commerce meaning no big capital outlay that would be required to achieve breeding.

CITES licensed production to try alleviate the black market/wild trade and so people could make legit money and good on them for the common sense approach. aquaculture farmers in the US should see if special permits can be granted to breed from tagged fish. there is a way to do this in Australia but its a real pain for paperwork ect. seeing as breeding and capital is hard i doubt anyone is that keen. if someone were to breed indoors ( which is possible) then it could encourage the investment and i think this might actually happen once asian farms get a hold on captive breeding indoors. the catch is it wont be public knowledge so an asian company will prob need to make the jump because we are talking intellectual property of company and investors are involved so new info wont likley be published..
you see if they develop new techniques for climate controlled breeding of select pairs then they still may as well just expand in the correct climate. its just cheaper.
theres not a doubt in my mind in ten years of big r and d dollars going into asian farms this will be achieved.. and then someone in the know "could" if the law allowed -set up in the US and may get permits to sell there for good dollars per fish. not sure if there is provisions for this type of thing in US law but can occur in AU, the problem is if done in AU they cant be sold locally unless legalized for pet shop sales. if this happened in AU it would likley be restricted to licensed farms for exporting only so your not getting top dollar locally but competing against asian farms (in outdoor/extensive/production) so you are selling young for only a few hundred bucks and not a few grand like the black market prices. it will be a matter of waiting and seeing what the new rules come about in Australia to see if anything is workable within those laws.
 
Arowana1;3407534; said:
Makes some sense in Australia as Asian Arowanas could be an invasive species and compete with native Australian Arowanas in tropical areas (kind of neat to have a river stocked with Chilli Reds) maybe if some escaped they could live together like the multiple species of freshwater basses here in California (Red Eye, Spotted , Smallmouth and Largemouth Bass). Has anyone kept Asian Arowanas with Australian Arowanas?

i kinda disagree. The Aussie Aros will be the more dominant of the two, and the main reason they did this is because the Asians are endangered and knowing Americans love to have lots of pets therefore driving up demand and therefore reducing the Asian aro in numbers
 
Schneider;3420250; said:
The people in Asia have to feed their breeding stock. They use ponds. Check out some of the projects some of the members of this site have tackled. Huge sums of money didn't stop these people. Besides these are valuable enough fish that a breeding operation could be cost effective. Nobody said these fish are like guppies, I just said there is no reason why success would only be possible in Asia.

the reason why only Asians usually succeed in breeding asian aros is because of the cheapness of labor compared to countries in the west.
 
Of all the billions of dollars that are spent in the US by Zoo's, aquariums, and universities I would doubt that money would be an issue if breeding asian aros in the US were attempted.

This is a hypothetical situation anyhow, but if the government were to allow a few specimens in as breeding stock, then likely the program would be funded by a gov. grant.

We are likely never to see if this to be true, but to argue that the only place in the world this fish could breed is in SE asia is :screwy:
 
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