Even as exploitive as Americans are we fail in comparison to ships anchors, fisherman and natural events in regard to the damage we do to living reefs. Almost 1/3 of the Corals in the Pacific were severely injured if not outright killed by ocean warming in 2005. WE however can be more easily controlled than the sea's boats and the weather. We unfortunately as a country are having a hard time giving up on our dependence on oil, as it is sill a very cheap source of power and is so easily storeable and transportable, therefore our weather is worsening and CO2 is being taken up by the oceans in huge amounts.
We might be saving the reefs from the aquarium trades irresponsible plundering and inept practices, only to lose them due to man caused climate change.
Walt claims he practiced only sustainable harvesting of Live rock, yet he fails to show how he is accomplishing such a miraculous feat. Live rock is made up of dead coral skeletons that are cemented together by coraline algae growth and covered by further layers of coraline and calcium carbonate precipitation binding on its surface.
Live rock is typically hundreds as years old, if not thousands. They are not adding anything to replace what they remove and are definitely removing it faster than it is being generated, so how is that sustainable yield being accomplished. They have not even bothered to replace the rock removed with land excavated carbonate rocks (base rocks). In my book they are simply written in as coral reef plunderers driven by the desires for money, no more and no less. If they were lees profit motivated and more motivated by conservation and sustainable yields they would have stated up mariculturing prior to removing the very first rock, coral or fish from the reefs. Then he or they might have some basis for claiming they always operated at sustainable yields.
Anyone that has ever kept or grown much stony coral realize a typical stoney corals growth is often times measured in milli meters of growth per year not meters per year. Walt's statement is akin to an oil company stating this counties producers of oil are only pumping oil out of the ground at a sustainable yield. We call petroleum as a non renewable resource as it takes so long for petroleum to form.
Reefs take many thousands of years to form an they are barely able to expand without human harvesting as their growth is so slow, yet it takes more than export quotas to control heir demise unless the harvesters are required to practice mariculture. If the coral reefs are not growing then we are harvesting beyond sustainable yields, and I have heard no emergency bulletins about the excessive growth and expansion of any of the worlds reefs
