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Interesting post from Walt about Tonga

Yes, youre right. Slander is a defamatory statement that is spoken, while libel is written. In my haste to respond, I didnt realize I had them mixed up. Thanks!
 
And you call yourself a lawyer! ;)


Out of curiosity though, Gresham made an interesting point about if the wild collection was shut down the hobby would collapse, by pressure from a group. Now are we talking each individual island? Because I find it hard to believe someplaces would want to stop their "gravy train", or we talking simply a ban on imports to the US? Which makes me wonder how much of the MO hobby is non-US? Surely the goods will be manufactured, perhaps it'll be harder (more expensive) to acquire equipment.
 
Mike,

What Gresham is saying is, in the future there is a potential a ban on all imports, they would be illegal, done, over, kaput, nada, no mas. Like wild parrots, monkeys, Pandas, pangolins etc.

That drives the demand down for dry goods which causes a rise in price in regards to said dry goods. It could easily get to a point where the domestic companies (or company as it's heading towards) would fold due to lack of revenue, or leave the country which I don't see happening because CGP has a strangle hold on the industry, and it is such a small part of their operation they would most likely shut that portion down and write it off. Of course the rest of the world will keep on turning, but many countries have stricter import laws already, or just don't have the wealth in the general population to sustain larger companies. It's gonna get interesting if the big boys don't clean themselves up, and hobbyists demand ethics from their suppliers by talking with their $$$$.
 
Man Jeremy reads me like a book :D

The US consumes something like ~80% of the LR imports, ~60% of livestock and as far as dry goods, dunno.

Many stations would go under as they are heavily US funded. Others could survive but they would have to raise prices. Prices globally would rise (not a bad thing really). My dream is one day 104th wakes up and finds damsels now land for $2.50 each, sell for $5 on the wholesale market and $15-$20 at the store. Low ballers would be charging $10 each :) And so on and so on :)

The deal with our trade as I keep saying is the economy of scale. Just an example, nothing implied by this as we're actually growing while others are shrinking :) If I had to scale down our product line due to lack of sales our production cost would go shooting up. We'd have to raise prices which would make it harder for dealers to buy, as well as for the consumers.

Look at dive groups like ScubaBob and you'll see the venom and lies we actually face. The TIME article is a clear case of the venom. The article was talking about a HI park. It then went on to talk about the perils of CN in the same paragraph leading the reader thinking that since that is now a park us MO dudes won't be juicing CN all over the place. There is no CN in HI, those boys do not need that junk.
 
Yeah I read about the snorkel bob bitchfest. Upon my trip to Maui & Kauai (which granted is very limited), what I saw were some nice smaller areas with lots of corals, not much algae, growing nicely, plenty of fish, some areas that were really over-run with algae, not many fish, but one common denominator for all those places were the people who were doing a lot of the damage simply touching corals, using them to "walk" around certain parts of the reef while snorkling, who knows maybe I would have done the same thing had it not been for knowing what that potentially can do.

So yeah, over harvesting of certain fish is never a good thing, but Snorkel Bob is looking out for his own cash cow and damn the damage they're doing.
 
Latest from the RC thread:

Hi Everyone,

I am Chris Turnier, former owner of Reefer Madness, and now the Mariculture and Livestock Manager at Walt Smith International in Fiji.

I was hired by Walt to specifically get the mariculture side of the business cranking (ie: aqua cultured coral and live rock) as this is my area of expertise. I have a BS in Fisheries with an emphasis in maricultue, and I have worked in the aquarium industry for the past 12 years.

In Fiji, our mariculture farm is slowly coming back after being wiped out by two cyclones in January. We now have close to 30,000 pieces of cultured coral on our farms, where close to 20% is placed back on the reef to repopulate areas that have bleached, been wiped out by pollution and/or storms. The rest is either set aside for F2 propagation or sent in our shipments to our various wholesalers around the world. What we have on the farm at the moment is just the beginning as we have lots and lots of room for growth. I spend at least 3 days a week (weather permitting), diving on our farms out in the ocean to make sure that everything is growing well and planted correctly.

I have also been developing new shapes to our already extensive cultured live rock line. We have literally tons upon tons of cultured live rock placed over areas of reef rubble that are and will be ready to supplant the sustainable live rock harvest (viewed by some as unsustainable but they fail to realize the actual area being collected from- which makes up less than maybe 1% of the overall reef area).

My whole life is built upon these farms. There is nothing else I would rather be doing. Walt placed me in this position. It is his dream as well to have a farm that competes with Indonesia (Bali, etc). These countries were forced to Aquaculture due to strains that a population of over 200 million bring. Fiji does not have these issues. Sure there is pollution local to the 4 larger cities but there are only around 800,000 people who live in the whole of Fiji, and most of the reefs are relatively pristine. The Fijian government did not enforce aquaculture upon the coral exporters. This is due to the fact that WSI alone has over 800 square miles of reef to collect from. I can travel by boat for more than 3 hours and still be in an area where we (and no other company) can collect from. That is HUGE! What that means is that we have close to no impact on the reef. A study was done by Ed Lovell of the University of the South Pacific who found that WSI collects 0.001% of the corals in our collection area. 0.001%!!!! That is beyond sustainable! There was a study done stating that up to 3% of a natural resource could be collected and still be sustainable. So those nay-Sayers that say that we are reef-rapers are incredibly mistaken. We are incredibly concerned with the environment. All of our divers are trained to have the utmost respect for the corals that they collect and the reefs that they collect from. Our divers are only armed with a hammer and a screw-driver. NOT CROW-BARS!!! We are meticulous in how we transport and keep the corals so that mortality is kept to an absolute minimum. Unfortunately no matter how careful we are there is breakage and die-off during transportation. When this happens we very carefully take the corals and place them back on the reef so that they can flourish once more.

Now that I have been in Fiji for over a year and I have been to Tonga several times I can now look back on what I have learned and observed and I can describe to you all what actually goes on here in the South Pacific. If any of you know me personally you all know that I am a very environmentally motivated person. It is me and my family’s life. It is extremely important to me to live and work for someone who shares the same value as I do. Walt has all of these values as well. Walt and I want this to be as environmentally sound a business as possible. That is the only way to keep the hundreds of Pacific Islanders that we employ in business for years to come. The world will not allow us to be careless with our environment. I will not allow the people who I manage to be careless. I want to save the reefs probably more than anyone that I know. But we can only do small parts. We need to focus on the future and the future is Mariculture and Aquaculture. Mariculture has not made Walt Smith International a dime. This is due to the slow movement of our hobby to gravitate toward cultured corals. WSI was the FIRST Company in the world to start commercially producing cultured corals and cultured live rock. Dave Palmer (when he was in the Solomon’s) was actually the first to attempt culturing corals but it was small scale and unfortunately temporary at that time.

Now I come to Tonga. Tonga is such beautiful little group of islands and reefs that cover an amazing amount of square miles. The diversity of coral (both soft and hard) exceeds that of Fiji (from what I have seen so far). It is an amazing place and you never know what you might see next while diving. Now I get to Eddie Hanson and his ranting on Walt. I am not sure where you feel you were called out. Walt never said your name and only a few within the actual business would actually remember those photos and actual instances. I think you are bringing up some old vendettas for your being booted out of Tonga and stating these issues to supposedly clear the air. I only know fragments of what happened in the past in Tonga. I heard bits and pieces through my years at Flying Fish Express and Reefer Madness. Several strange things that have been stated by Eddie about Walt are all hear-say. He said, that diver said… so on and so forth. From what I can see there is no truth to most of these statements. There are no Crow-Bars used for collecting corals. There isn’t the desire to collect and eliminate the rare corals. But one of the biggest problems is that there are 5 companies that all collect in the same area. That means that no fingers can be pointed at one coral exporter for the demise of the industry.

I’ll give you all an example of a certain situation that I learned of while in Tonga. I’m sure those that have been in the hobby awhile remember the huge and beautiful Purple Rhodactis inchoata that came from Tonga. Walt found these mushrooms in a secret place and he specifically told his divers to collect a few each week and not to tell anyone about the location. He was able keep this going for years and the population of mushrooms never decreased. But then one of WSI’s coral divers left for another company and within several weeks every single mushroom was gone!

I do know what occurs in Tonga these days. I have trained and showed our WSI divers what to collect. Our Tonga WSI station is run almost exactly the same way as our Fiji station. They have a small axe or a hammer and a screwdriver. That is all. I will state again, there are no Crow-bars used while collecting corals! What would the point be? You want to preserve the coral that you are collecting so that you can export them. You can’t sell something that is bashed and broken. And we don’t find a rare coral or color morph and wipe it out. What is the point of that? We want to collect it over the long run so that it will thrive and we can continue to get a descent price for it. That was our objective with the Tonga Purple Mush. That policy worked until other companies had their way.

Live rock in Tonga is collected from vast area of reef that has very little coral growth on them. This is usually due to natural environmental factors that include high impact zone, high turbidity, storm damage, etc. In difference to what most believe, it is incredible sustainable when you look at the reef as a whole and exactly what percentage of that reef is being collected for live rock harvest. Only a very few know how much actual reef there is in Tonga. It is vast, probably as expansive as Fiji. That means that there is plenty of areas to collect live rock from and because the areais so large that impact is very minimal.

Now this leads me to the future of the industry in Tonga. Unfortunately the government is indecisive as to what direction it wants this industry to go. But this could all easily be solved if an outside company came in to do a Non-Detriment Finding report and an Environmental Impact Study to show the Tongan government how benign our industry actually is. These studies in combination with several set collection areas for the different companies, while developing a plan for Aquaculture and Mariculture should allow our industry to go on far into the foreseeable future.

Thanks for hearing me out…

Chris Turnier
Click to expand...
 
Too bad Chris missed the mark on the crow bar comment. They use it to collect FLAME HAWKS there buddy, not coral :D But he's a coral guy, not a fish guy, so I'll give him a break.
 
When did Chris sell reefermadness? No wonder the site looks so different and there's not a magically delightful story about every coral on there anymore.
 
I would be interested in seeing a study done there as he suggests. Does anyone know about the Fiji situation? Are they really collecting at a sustainable rate?
 
A couple interesting things he mentions, someone did a study that said they only took 0.001% of the corals, that's around 1/100th a square mile worth of corals which is a lot depending upon the time frame. The sustainability aspect would be if that area actually grew back in the time frame it took to get the next 0.001%

Also they mention 20% of the corals went back into the ocean to rebuild the reef? How effective is that? I've always suggested that if the coral reefs die hobbyists would have the only corals left to transplant (tongue in cheek mind you), but couldn't imagine if that would work. Hobbyist tanks vs scale of reefs is like earth vs solar system.

However I think it was Rich who mentioned it, seems like it's getting down to a he said/she said type of argument, first Walt mentions an "expert" who owned a store, now Chris comes in as an "expert" as well. Not that I know the expertise of these two individuals at all, but did think it was a little funny.
 
Sorta correct Mike. It's .001% coral counts, not mass. He's talking TOC types studies. Don't ask me what it stands for, I just know it's total catch :lol:

All the work I've seen points to Fiji being a sustainable "coral fisheries" model.
 
One of the most frustrating things to me about this side of the industry is the lack of data. It serves to pump up the he said she said confusion (maybe its intentional). It all sounds good, but I without data and evidence its impossible to know what the truth is.
 
Hiep, an environmental impact report (not statement) on that scale would cost an incredible amount of money. The problem is who is going to foot the bill? Fiji? WS? the hobbyists? Who is going select who is to do the report? the Fiji Govt.? Industry? Al Gore? Plus, "certification" has been tried before, but the money disappears *poof* gone, like the Burger King twisting his ring, and were all left sitting on our hands wondering what's the right thing to do.

I'm in favor of regulation don't get me wrong, but it is the actual execution and asking everyone to make a sacrifice that gets peoples panties in a bunch.

I'll draw an analogy, when I drive up and down the PCH I watch a large upgrade to the city of HMBs water supply, they are raising the capacity and putting in a ton of new fire hydrants. Everyday I see the lonely biologist with the clipboard staring off into space. The kicker is the biologist sits there with the Audubon Societies guide the the reptiles and amphibians of the West, this girl (I call her girl because I have at least 15 years on her) looks fresh out of college, and obviously has no idea what she is looking at. A third grader could do her job, and we pay her to sit at a job site where the job will be going on for over a year.

With all of the educated people in our country, especially the young greenies, we can't even find someone that knows native species, of which they are most likely looking for a couple of indicator species. How do we expect to find people that know anything about the complexities of a reef OUTSIDE of sitting in a classroom. When I was in a MRM program, I got frustrated and left because none of my classmates could keep a goldfish alive, let alone 20,000 hybrid striped bass. It's very frustrating, and one of the main reasons I left the hobby years ago, it's sad I can't stay away.
 
[quote author=Thales link=topic=4168.msg50298#msg50298 date=1217266849]
One of the most frustrating things to me about this side of the industry is the lack of data. It serves to pump up the he said she said confusion (maybe its intentional). It all sounds good, but I without data and evidence its impossible to know what the truth is.
[/quote]

Fiji has the data, I've seen a few of the reports :)
 
[quote author=Thales link=topic=4168.msg50307#msg50307 date=1217270919]
That's more he she said. :D

Is the data available to hobbyists?
[/quote]

have you even searched for it or even attempted to find it prior to saying it's more he said she said? I found it and I am a hobbyist ;)

Send Fiji Fisheries an email, or google scholar the author listed in Chris's post. Nothing is a simple as my handing it to" the hobbyists", they have to be creative just like me :)

Besides, I deleted it long ago. Try searching RDO, it was posted there eons ago.
 
Well...
Saying I saw the data but don't have it is he said she said! :D Its kinda like Ron saying the data is out there about sand beds all you have to do is find it. Of course you know this is not really about you at all. Besides, do you want me to look for the papers or do you want me to finish the graphic work? :D

I think if the industry is really interested in 'doing it right' that that data would be readily available. If I were Walt, and was positioning myself in the industry/hobby as someone who cares I would absolutely make the data that supports my claims easily available to the public. It does look like walt is doing that, its coming soon, and he does have pdf's on his site, but they are 'forbidden'. :D

Besides, even if the data is available it still becomes he said she said - look at what happens with studies of reef foods!

My frustration I guess is more about the world in general. Its seems impossible to believe anything anymore unless you see it yourself, and even then, you have to wonder what was changed when they knew you were coming to take a look.

An independent 3rd party organization that did spot checks might be nice...
 
[quote author=Thales link=topic=4168.msg50310#msg50310 date=1217272622]

An independent 3rd party organization that did spot checks might be nice...

[/quote]

While I agree with this, IME the people that hire the 3rd party hire the people that say what they want to hear, who's going to make the call?.

Like you said Rich "even if the data is available it still becomes he said she said", it's damn frustrating because so many people make decisions based on emotion, rather than science, and hard data.
 
[quote author=Thales link=topic=4168.msg50312#msg50312 date=1217274496]
No one hires the third party. Independently funded and all that. Its my pipe dream. Got 10 million? :D
[/quote]
Should we do a BAR bake sale? :D
 
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