Cyanide Fishing

A method of collecting live fish, chiefly for the aquarium trade, by spraying a sodium cyanide mixture into a reef habitat to stun the fish so they can be captured; the practice also poisons and damages many other marine organisms, including coral itself. Believed to have originated in the Philippines in the 1950s, it later spread to fishing operations in Indonesia, Thailand, the Maldives and Taiwan, and is practiced mainly in Southeast Asia. Though illegal in many of the countries where it occurs, enforcement is often minimal. The World Resources Institute found that about twenty percent of live fish traded on the Philippine market in 1996 had been caught using cyanide, and environmental engineer David Dzombak has estimated that twelve thousand to fourteen thousand short tons of live food fish are caught this way each year; grouper, wrasse and coral trout are among the most commonly targeted species. Up to two thirds of the colorful reef fish packed into plastic bags for the aquarium trade die in transit, and an estimated seventy to ninety percent of aquarium fish exported from the Philippines are caught with cyanide. The practice is driven largely by rising demand for live fish in upscale restaurants in wealthier nearby countries, combined with the extremely low wages earned by the fishermen who use it.