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I don't believe it is enough to tell people not to buy them because they don't do well in captivity. People have been saying that for many years about many of the animals we keep and yet people still buy them and they are still being collected. With many of these animals it has been the hobbyist that have made great strides in the care of these animals. Through hobbyist sharing their experiances with these animals we have become much better at caring for them.
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Yes we must rely on the hobbyist to advance the hobby. But it is also important to encourage people to keep specimens that will stay alive to minimize this hobby's impact on the reefs. Leave the difficult to keep stuff to the advanced hobbyist (whatever that term means
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I would rather a hobbyist buy the coral and make an effort to keep it alive than to allow it to die in the LFS. How many Goniapora have you seen melt away in your LFS only to come back a week later and there are 3 new ones to take its place? The reality is that they are not going to stop collecting Elegance corals just because you or I say they should. So, we can't expect the scientist to fix this problem for us. We can't expect the collecters to stop collecting them.
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Unfortunately this is true. We have difficulty as hobbyists controlling what collectors actually collect and what wholesaler get in. However that being said, I think as hobbyists we do have major influence over what stores actually get in. Because in the end it is in their interest to get in what sells. And it does work down the line. Wholesalers get in what the stores want, shippers get from collectors what the wholesalers want etc... That is why you don't see stores carrying dendros and gonis in the same amounts they used to (at least the stores in my part of the country). Unfortunately from what I understand dendros are still the most collected coral. I'm not sure where they are getting shipped to as I personally rarely see them in stores.
I still want to see a study showing where elegances corals are currently being collected versus where they used to be collected and more detailed facts on water quality and light quality they get in the wild. I think that showing quantitative differences in water and light quality for areas that elegance corals used to be collected in versus areas they are collected in now would give us important information to determine why these guys are so hard to keep now.
My other question is, if the elegance corals collected 10-15 years ago in the hobby were so hardy, why do I not see many of these around?