To Protect Coral Tropical fish farming has been proposed as one approach to protecting threatened banks of coral in the Asian region. Now, American marine biologists have presented a plan to this effect. Their intent is to prevent the continued capture of tropical fish on the open seas.
Tropical fish are a valuable commodity in international trade.
Until now, the animals were usually caught by divers, who squirt sodium cyanide into the water to anesthetize the fish. However, this method causes a number of animals to die and sink to the bottom, where they land on coral banks, which in turn are contaminated by the fish cadavers and the sodium cyanide. The marine biologists have found a way to simplify the expensive process of tropical fish farming. The fish larvae can apparently be fed with copepods - tiny crustaceans that spend a part of their lives as inactive eggs. Fish raised on these copepods have a 23 percent higher chance of survival, and show a clearly accelerated growth rate.