By Alexander Lane
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

June 25, 2003

"Finding Nemo," the hit Disney movie about a tropical fish desperate to escape from a dentist's aquarium, preaches against everything from overprotective fathers to boats with trawls that catch too many innocent by-swimmers.

It also lectures the growing subculture of saltwater aquarium keepers. The movie portrays the capturing of fish and other creatures from coral reefs ‹ the primary means of supplying saltwater aquariums ‹ as cruel and destructive.

In a terrifying scene, a diver nets young Nemo from his reef. The tiny clownfish winds up in a saltwater tank and meets Gill, a crusty old angelfish who was also born in the ocean. The two spend their time in the glass prison concocting elaborate escape schemes.

"Since the reviews first started, that's all the reefers have been talking about," said Philip Levanda of Nutley, N.J., a 27-year-old engineer and coral reef keeper.

Intentionally or not, Disney has dived into the hottest issue in the world of tropical fish-keeping. Pet stores are filled with fish, corals, anemones and other creatures ripped from depleted coral reefs, often after having been stunned by a squirt of cyanide.

Reef-enthusiasts are trying to stem the practice. A Hawaii-based group is struggling to start a stamp-of-approval program for retailers who say their creatures have been tank-bred or "ethically captured." Nine-year-old Alexander Gould, the voice of Nemo, has signed on as the group's spokesman.

As word spreads of the industry's destructive practices, some fish-keepers are swearing off mass-market pet stores, instead trading their own colorful coral fragments in clubs popping up across the country and seeking out eco-minded fish suppliers.

"When I first started out, I didn't know about the cyanide and the depletion," Levanda said. "Lately, I've been watching who I buy from and where they're getting it from."

Levanda said he trades with other expert hobbyists and buys from Internet providers who advertise ethical collection.

Although the movie might help raise awareness about the environmental hazards of scavenging coral reefs for exotic fish, it also has generated interest in clownfish as lovable pets.

"I kind of have the sense that kids want to set up an aquarium to have Nemo at home," said Fernando Nosratpour, an assistant curator of the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

At the Birch Aquarium, which has more than 35 fish exhibits, some fish are bred in captivity and others are captured in the wild. Nosratpour said Birch officials don't associate with anyone who captures fish in unethical ways, such as the cyanide squirt.

A spokesman for Petco, the Sorrento Valley-based national pet-supply chain, said many people who want to buy clownfish don't understand the time, effort and money involved in caring for these saltwater fish.

"It's not an impulse buy," spokesman Shawn Underwood said.

He said most of the fish sold at Petco are bred in captivity. Petco buys some exotic saltwater fish from wholesalers who catch them in the wild. All of the company's clownfish are captive-bred in Florida.

Aquarium-keeping has been around since the mid-1800s, but only in the past 12 years or so has the average home hobbyist been able to maintain a miniature coral reef. Advances in science's understanding of ocean chemistry have enabled anyone willing to spend several hundred dollars to create their own tropical ecosystem.

Aquarium owners can buy rock chiseled off reefs from places such as Fiji, the Philippines and Indonesia that is crawling with bacteria to digest harmful nitrogen and turn it into oxygen. Hermit crabs and starfish scour the sand, filtering out fish waste, with mechanical protein skimmers taking up the slack. Powerful halogen lights feed photosynthetic corals. Aquarists treat their water with everything from synthetic salt to calcium supplements.

Between equipment and creatures, experts say aquarium-keeping has exploded into a $500 million industry. Although statistics are not methodically compiled, about 10 million marine specimens were sold in U.S. pet stores at an average price of $10 in 1995, according to a survey by the American Marinelife Dealers Association.

Coral reefs represent about 1 percent of the ocean, yet 25 percent of all marine species rely on them for some element of their life span, such as spawning or feeding.

One area of Hawaii known as the Gold Coast ‹ thanks to the schools of yellow tangs that once populated its reef, tinting the water the color of sunshine ‹ lost nearly all of the graceful tropical fish, an aquarium favorite for their beauty and algae-eating skills.

Corals themselves ‹ tiny animals whose colonies can take the forms of everything from branching trees to pipe organs to neon-green brains ‹ are relatively easy to propagate in captivity. Hobbyists can simply cut off a fragment of a friend's specimen, glue it to a rock and watch it grow. But many are broken off reefs and sold by stores.

Tropical fish are more difficult to propagate. Despite major advances in the captive breeding of clownfish ‹ the most popular aquarium fish ‹ many fish larvae will not survive in captivity. Only about 2 percent of fish sold in pet stores are bred in captivity, according to the Hawaii-based Marine Aquarium Council.

The council has created a certification program for nondestructive fish collectors, middlemen and retailers, but the effort is in its infancy. The group approves of collecting live fish, as long as it is done humanely drugs and does not exhaust the local population of a species.

"The reality is this trade will be based on wild-caught fish for a long time to come. The need is to fix it," said Paul Holthus, the council's executive director.

Some ardent reef watchers, such as environmental law professor Howard Latin of Rutgers University in New Jersey, believe the Marine Aquarium Council does not go far enough.

"Like narcotics, it's never going to be solved by imposing measures in poor countries," Latin said. "The problem has to be solved by eliminating the demand or tolerance in larger countries, and the United States is by far the largest importer of aquarium fish."

Staff writer Alex Roth contributed to this report.