The global trade in marine ornamental species

From ocean to aquarium
as weight values include water and packaging, hence
substantially overestimating the volume of live material,
especially for fish and non-coral invertebrates. Moreover,
trade data obtained through customs’ statistics should be
treated with caution as some operators have been known to
overstate quantities on their invoices for insurance
purposes 8 , or on other occasions understate quantities so
as to reduce the amount of tax payable and keep annual
shipments within the individual allowable quotas 57 . In Hong
Kong, a study comparing information obtained from trade
statistics with data collected through market surveys
indicated that official declarations of imports are underreported
by at least two- to three-fold 24 .
In very few cases will countries report trade
statistics in terms of the number of specimens exported.
Singapore and the Maldives present exceptions to this,
holding government records of the number of marine
ornamental fish exported, showing a total of 1,294,200
fish being exported in 1998 for the former, and 262,641 in
1997, 182,916 in 1998, and 167,000 in 1999 for the latter 6 .
Furthermore, in order to comply with governmental
guidelines for obtaining a licence, collectors in Vanuatu,
Tonga and the Solomon Islands are required to submit
records of their exports, in terms of number of each
species exported 8 . State governments in Australia are
unique in that they require collectors to register catch
data as opposed to export data 41 .
Thus, the available sources of data generally
provide, at best, qualitative information and little reliable
quantitative information on numbers, countries of origin
and destinations of the main species in trade 8 .
THE GLOBAL MARINE AQUARIUM DATABASE (GMAD)
Since April 2000, UNEP-WCMC and MAC have been
collaborating with members of trade associations such as
AKKII, PTFEA, SAFEA, OFI and OATA to establish GMAD as
a freely available source of information on the global
aquarium industry. The common objective of GMAD is to
gather, integrate, collect, standardize and provide fast and
easy access to data on the trade of individual species by
placing this information in the public domain, through a
web-searchable interface (http://www.unep-wcmc.org/
marine/GMAD).
For their own files, companies keep records of their
sales, either on company computer databases or, more
commonly, as paper copies of their invoices. Although the
way in which companies register their trade records varies,
all records show species name, quantity, date and usually
origin and/or destination. A number of these companies
provided UNEP-WCMC with access to their sales records.
These data have been processed, checked and formatted:
species names have been verified and electronic data from
different electronic systems placed into a single standardized
database. As at August 2003, GMAD contained 102,928
Royal angelfish, Pygoplites diacanthus (left) and a nudibranch (right).
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