This has been coming up a lot as a topic of conversation. Animals in captivity, animals being killed, etc. I hope I can shed some light on the topic and offer some of what I've learned to everyone. Science, especially a lot of the biological sciences are inherently deadly to the animals in question, or that animal will never survive to reproduce and carry out its natural life cycle. Not all facilities or projects do this, but here are some cases which you as an individual may raise objection to, but I'll explain a little more about the natures of each topic to maybe help clarify questions that might arise.
One of my projects was to study Cephalopholis argus under a grad student. The fish is a grouper which was introduced to the Hawai'ian islands and has since decimated many reef fish populations. Fishing tournaments are held and literally thousands of these fish are shot for sport. We TRY to eliminate them from the reefs. After they have been killed they are sent to a lab and processed for growth data. Measurements like the size of their mouth, length, and mass are taken. I was responsible for taking out their otoliths so we could correlate our measurement data with age data.
This is an invasive species which if it's seen on the reef by a fisherman we recommend you try to kill it even if we will not be processing the fish for research data.
Another project carried out by a Ph.D student who went through the Waikiki Aquarium was to look at the ability of butterflyfishes to digest coral and sponge tissues. To do this work maybe a hundred or more butterflyfishes were collected at various ages, some babies and some adults. They were kept in pens and fed various treatments of enzymes of interest via syringe for several weeks. At the end of the feeding period the fishes were euthanized following humane vertebrate research protocols. Their livers were the harvested for processing and various other measurements were taken of organs.
In this care all animals were cared for properly, only as many animals as are needed to collect sufficient data are taken, and euthanasia meets guidelines set down by a national standard. The information this project produces could give insight on how to care for butterflyfishes in captivity, how corals and sponges disappearing from the reefs can affect feeding behavior, and a myriad of other information pertaining to marine toxicology, and ecology. Is this wrong?
At an aquarium one of our primary goals is to educate. At the Waikiki Aquarium we make our best attempts to raise and captive breed many animals. Will all of our animals have offspring? No, probably less than 1% will have babies that survive to adulthood. Is it wrong to keep these animals out of the wild then? The majority of all animals kept at an aquarium are wild caught. Breeding marine fishes is incredibly difficult, if you successfully breed a fish you usually get to publish a paper because you were the first one to EVER do it in captivity. Our new curator had something like close to half a million dollars go into a project to breed yellow tangs and they could only get them to survive to 14 days old after many years of trying.
Is it wrong to keep these animals in captivity? I don't think so, we have specimens you won't see anywhere else in the world at our aquarium. Not every animal is given the care it probably deserves, it's the nature of aquariums. Like if there's a sick fish in a five thousand gallon tank filled with corals and 400 other fish, there's no way you can get it out. Believe me, I've tried. At an aquarium the goal is to educate our visitors on the animals they see, in a lot of the cases even help people realize they actually exist. Are we keeping our animals out of the wild, and will most never reproduce and fulfill their role in an ecosystem? Yes.
Despite this, if one person sees a leafy seadragon at our aquarium, is inspired to breed them. Becomes an aquarist one day and actually does breed them, they might have just saved an entire species.
It's all an ethical bunch of mush, and science inherently results in the deaths of a lot animals. We learn from it though with an end goal of trying to do good in the world and not waste the opportunities and lives we are given. With my personal project I will be studying damselfish and breeding them. In the first part of my project five days after my fish are born they will all be killed for growth data and measurements. If I succeed though with my project I will have a guide on how to breed the species step by step with research proving which methods are most effective in the hopes this species will be able to be successfully aquacultured by many people and pressure will be taken off native populations as I might be able to prove it's cheaper to breed them than catch, ship, then sell them.
Science kills, all aquariums and marine facilities you go to do things that make you cringe or sad, it is regulated though and the regulations are strict. Nothing gets published if it was deemed unethical or cruel and investigations are often done to check this. Before getting upset at seeing captive animals or visiting places with them check and see if they are doing research of some kind or ask yourself what the end goals are.
