Issues

The Live Reef Fish Trade

A popular trend in seafood is the consumption of ultra-fresh groupers and wrasse fishes from coral reefs.  These fish are caught live on coral reefs in Sabah and transported still alive to restaurants where they are kept in aquaria until they are chosen by a diner.  The majority of fish from around Southeast Asia are sent (via plane or ship) to Hong Kong.  As regional affluence rises, other destinations including Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Kota Kinabalu and mainland China are becoming important markets as well.  

Groupers and wrasses tend to be some of the top predators on a reef.  As top predators, they have a strong influence on their ecosystem and prey species populations on the reef.   Groupers and large wrasses also have long life cycles and mature late in life.  They tend to reproduce by spawning in large groups on one or two nights of the year at a specific location.  They also maintain unusual sex-change behaviour whereby a few old fish are male and all others are female.  When a male dies, the senior female then becomes male.  These factors make them extremely vulnerable to overfishing.  

It is very difficult to find many grouper and large wrasse species on most reefs in Sabah these days.  A three-year series of over 70 survey dives in the Kudat-Banggi area found only a few individual groupers larger than 30 cm when they should have found a few on every dive.  With the exception of a few well protected reefs in Sabah, this is the case on almost every reef system.