Marine Fish And The Law

[Baan Kiki]

I am about to put a large fish tank into my bar and was thinking of stocking it with marine fish I catch at sea.

I have had conflicting advice, one saying certain reef fish are protected, with stiff fines and the other saying, as long as I'm not doing it commercially it's OK. I have kept fish most of my life and always dreamed of a marine tank. Now I don't know what I can put in a tank and what I can't.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[steelepulse]

I have a marine aquarium here in Phuket also and to get the firsh here,  Iwas told I needed a permit.  Well it so happens that Phuket province is one of the provinces where you can't get a permit.  I ended up having to import my fish from overseas into BKK using another guys permit ( cost me 25,000 baht for the privilege of using his permit) then had the fish flown down from BKK after clearing customs there. YOu can't directly have the fish clear customs here due to some law passed about 4 y

ars ago here.

 

I order fish both from the Red Sea and from Sri Lanka.  Cost of fish is reasonable, air freight gets expensive.

Now if you wanted to do it another way, you could go out and catch some fish while fishing, put them in a cooler then drop them off in your aquarium.  Tough to catch good looking fish though.

BTW how large will your tank be?

[Milo]

I assume as you have always dreamed of a marine tank you haven't actually kept one before? Problem being you can't use the seawater (too many pollutants that can quickly screw up your filter), must mix up your own saline, and that MUST exactly match the HG, temp, alkalinity etc of the water they've been removed from. I've been led to believe the commercial operations use a kind of 'hafway house' idea slowly changing the fish from natural seawater to the commercially produced salt mix to acclimatise them.

Not really sure about the licenses and stuff, or fish that you couldn't legally take, all I do know is you can't go hacking off lumps of coral!!

Remembering how much trouble my 6'x2'x2' reef tank was for the first couple of years back in England until it really settled down, still had the odd spike in one or another value, marine fish and especially corals are just so bloody touchy. Can't use copper based medications for the fish as they're highly poisonous to the corals etc, etc. I'd advise don't even think about it unless you can get your hands on the correct marine testing equipment here and have a great deal of spare time to begin with!

That being said, that tank of mine was worth every penny of the (probably over!) 10,000 pounds I spent on it over the years. Don't foget you'll also need a larger filter and protien skimmer before you set up than for a freshwater system.