Dear Mike, thank you in return for your very conscious and honest answer. I assure you that your position sounds fully reasonable to me, and I support your way to proceed entirely.
My position will sound very hard and inexorable to many aquarists, I know. Therefore I shall try to explain it here with some words.
The Parosphromenus-project’s main aim is to inform about the Licorice gouramis: their diversity, their behaviour, their habitats, their demands on nutrition and milieu values, and their fate. In a way, they are ideal aquarium fish: small and colourful, peaceful and ready to be satisfied if given the right conditions. But their fate is imminent extinction. We think that an aquarist living far from the rainforest logging in south-east Asia should know this. He engages in a fine hobby, but he should be aware of its connexions and interrelations.
Most fish that are caught and sold for aquaristic purposes live a short life as individuals, die and are replaced by the next. The normal aquaristic hobby is consuming nature to large an extent. I do not reject that, but we should try to influence it to a certain degree: by making people more aware for the connexions and interrelations that are bound to a fine hobby that is followed by millions of addicts in the whole world. It’s commerce, too; we freely use the resources of nature for decorating our homes. That’s all right, too, it’s for pleasure and learning and both are good things. But we should be aware that sometimes we love fish which are highly endangered in nature, as the licorice are; there are others, too. And therefore there is a second aim bound to our project: to try to influence the hobby in general. The second aim is to participate to a certain degree in strategies to reduce the threat on natural diversity by using the hobby as a means to fight that mere consuming mentality.
The normal hobbyist (and I repeat: there are millions, far less in the case of the licorice, maybe one thousand? In our database there are about 250 addresses up to the present day, but nearly every week new friends join) is a mere fishkeeper. He could be a friend of nature, I admit, but he feels rather weak and powerless when the fight against the destruction of nature is concerned. As you told us quite convincingly. This is realistic an attitude. But I like to add: You are not powerless and weak. You can act, in small measures yourself, of course, but nevertheless: act. And you can influence the thinking and acting of others. By talking about it and behaving as a sort of model. There is a slight chance of changing the hobbyist’ world from mere keeping to participation in positive action. At least we can try to gather people who share this opinion.
This thinking is behind our website. Simply keeping nice fish for learning and pleasure is a fine thing; I never would dispute that. And what you, Mike, are intending is still more: Giving the fish a better home than in the tanks of the fish-seller. But trying to breed and propagate the fish not for putting it back to nature (that’s irrational, for many reasons) but for becoming a bit less dependent from their resources and from the markets is a reasonable aim. I read that from your lines. And therefore you are welcome here.
Thank you for the good wishes and have a happy New Year yourself.
The
PAROSPHROMENUS PROJECT
