WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • MARCH 2018 47 perspective, wildlife farming provides cheap alternatives to wildcaught commodities and so lowers their prices, thereby reducing incentives to poach (Bulte and Damania 2005). In this way, wildlife farming is a “supply-side” approach to wildlife conservation. As early as the 19th century, attempts to domesticate wildlife have been made, such as with eland and buffalo in Africa (NtiamoaBaidu 1997). Wildlife farming has been of particular interest in Africa because of the importance of bush meat in the diet of people. In the United States, silver foxes and minks were once farmed in the 1930s to supply the fur industry in the United States, reducing the number of captured animals. Among the benefits derived from wildlife ranching in North America are greater productivity of food animals, the provision of healthy alternative food sources, diversification of commodities and economic gains to private landowners (Butler et al. 2005). Wildlife farming is also being explored in Southeast Asia, which is at the center of the wildlife trade due to its large and rapidly growing populations and high economic growth rate (Nijman 2010). Wildlife farming and its effects on conservation efforts have been explored in Indonesia (Lyons and Natusch 2011) and Vietnam (Drury 2009, Brooks et al. 2010). Wildlife farming is a viable alternative to hunting and deforestation in neotropical forests, another heavily exploited habitat type (Nogueira and Nogueira-Filho 2011). Most wildlife farming practices and studies on them are terrestrial. The focus has often been on terrestrial animals harvested for their meat or those exploited for their various body parts. There is no mention of the farming of threatened aquatic wildlife in the otherwise comprehensive review of wildlife farming by Tensen (2016). Similarly, the paper by Diana (2009) on the conservation implications of aquaculture makes no mention of wildlife farming. A considerable hurdle is one of terminology; the term wildlife does not commonly include commercially traded fish, and this may partly explain why a great number of such fish are not listed by CITES (UNODC 2016). Aquaculture is commonly considered to pharmaceuticals, food, building materials, cultural items, clothing and ornamentation, and pets. The combined global value of legal wildlife trade in 2008 was US$ 24.5 billion (TRAFFIC Southeast Asia and van Asch 2013). The most widely traded marine organisms, which are among the most impacted group, are sharks, marine turtles, coral reef fish (primarily for the aquarium trade) and seahorses (Nijman 2010, TRAFFIC Southeast Asia and van Asch 2013, UNODC 2016). Wildlife trade is now considered by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as one of the major specialized areas of international organized crime, along with trade in drugs, weapons and humans (UNODC 2016). Wildlife trafficking has negatively affected wild populations through poaching. Almost 30 million of the 35 million CITES-listed animals exported from 1998 to 2007 were sourced from the wild (Nijman 2010) and less than 4.5 million were derived from captive-breeding facilities. Harvesting for the aquarium trade, a global industry that is estimated to be worth some US$ 200-330 million annually (Wabnitz et al. 2003), has been particularly threatening to marine life. Most species collected for the trade are derived from nature despite successful aquaculture and post-larval rearing (Tlusty 2002, Shuman et al. 2005). Harvested groups are estimated to be more than 150 species of stony corals, hundreds of species of other invertebrates, and over 1,400 reef fish species from 50 families (Rhyne et al. 2012). This has caused considerable disturbance of coral reef ecosystems in terms of biodiversity loss (Kolm and Berglund 2003, Shuman et al. 2005), collapse of fisheries due to preferential fishing for immature fishes (Wood 2001), and introduction of invasive species and pathogens (Semmens et al. 2004, Rixon et al. 2005, Gertzen et al. 2008). Wildlife Farming is Largely a Terrestrial Practice The most attractive prospect of wildlife farming is reducing harvest pressure on wild populations. The CITES trading system permits the exchange of organisms (or their derivatives) that are bred in captivity and artificially propagated. From an economic (CONTINUED ON PAGE 48) Harvest of sandfish Holothuria scabra juveniles reared in ponds for stock enhancement at the BFAR-NIFTDC Invertebrates Hatchery in BonuanBinloc, Dagupan City, Philippines. Photo: Dennis Tanay. Sandfish Holothuria scabra breeders being prepared for induced spawning at the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources – National Integrated Fisheries Technology Development (BFAR-NIFTDC) Invertebrates Hatchery in Bonuan-Binloc, Dagupan City, Philippines. Photo: Dennis Tanay.
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