to feed the fish.... or not to feed the fish...?

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willfscubamadeira

Registered
Scuba Instructor
Messages
10
Reaction score
2
Location
Madeira
# of dives
500 - 999
Hi all

Ok a very simple question, i'm looking at feeding the fish on my house reef to promote growth and increase the amount of fish there are. We have fish men that are further away from the reef that don't fish where divers dive. I thought if at least we feed the fish to increase the number of fish it has to be good for everyone.

Please don't just give a yes or no answer, I want to know the reasons for and against.

It seems that its an old world diver idea to feed the fish. But its been beaten out of divers by agencies like PADI saying you shouldn't do anything to the ocean.... I think this idea is counter productive. We (humans) are way over fishing in our oceans, and now doing nothing to help them recover.

I have the idea that i could freeze house brick sized fish cut offs and place them in a submerged barrel with small holes in that way the smaller animals of the ocean could benefit the most there for increasing the food chain.

Cheers
Wil
 
I would certainly not endorse the feeding of fish. This will change their behavior for the worse, as evidenced by countless other experiments like the one you are proposing. Your reef has resources to support the population of fish it currently has. If you increase the number of fish by supplementing the food available to them, the reef will become overpopulated. What will happen then if you stop feeding the fish?
 
What she said.
The fish will grow dependent on you instead of being able to feed themselves. It'll do more harm.
 
I wouldn't recommend it either. The best way to propagate fish on your reef is to protect your reef. While its true that our oceans are over fished; reefs occupy a different niche than the support structure for most commercially harvested fish (grouper/snapper and other reef harvests accepted). Introducing artificially sourced food into the chain may provide temporary affect on the reef population but it does nothing to address the larger issue that its reef devastation causing harm to our reef fish not lack of food. The reef is its own ecosystem with its own food chain. You cannot supplement food and hope to overcome a trophic imbalance on the reef. I would start from the bottom up. Protect the reef by protecting its primary producers of food and shelter, the coral. That will foster a good biomass in nutrients, in turn fostering good small and prey fish populations which will foster good predatory population and ultimately a healthy ecosystem. Once the coral is gone there isn't enough frozen bait in the world to save our reef populations. Just my two cents...
 
Sorry i should have been clearer, i am on the boarder of tropical and temperate. The water temperature is not warm enough to support corals to take up the majority of the reef. There are some but very very few and far between.

99% of the reef is rocks covered with algae and plant vegetation. There is a sand substrate further out on my reef.

I have looked for any studies on the matter and have come up short. Does any one have any links of marine biologist studies of the effects of feeding fish?
 
Sorry i should have been clearer, i am on the boarder of tropical and temperate. The water temperature is not warm enough to support corals to take up the majority of the reef. There are some but very very few and far between.

99% of the reef is rocks covered with algae and plant vegetation. There is a sand substrate further out on my reef.

I have looked for any studies on the matter and have come up short. Does any one have any links of marine biologist studies of the effects of feeding fish?

Hmm, that changes the thought pattern a bit. I may have misunderstood your description of 'house reef' as well. Is this an artificial reef you have installed/maintained? If, so I wonder what the introduction of supplementary feed would do to the carrying capacity of your reef, or if it would have any long term affect at all. I wonder if you wouldn't still be best served by a bottom up approach, providing supplemental assistance to the reef itself versus trying to jump over it on the food chain. I don't know if I would buy into the 'more harm than good' theory unless you were feeding nonstop for several years and then suddenly quit. I don't know that the theory of wild animal dependence which is well proven for land mammals in high traffic areas translates 100% below sea level. Its certainly not the same as when larger predators (sharks/eels/etc) begining to look to divers for food because they have been fed so many times; that is more of an association than a dependence, they are still doing plenty of hunting on their own. To me it would be more of a question of do your provide 'more value than effort'.

Definitely an interesting question, Ill see what I can dig up.
 
99% of the reef is rocks covered with algae and plant vegetation. There is a sand substrate further out on my reef.

You might look at increasing the size of the reef with addition of artificial reef materials. A rock reef only needs more rock.



Bob
-----------------------
Looks for simple answers.
 
thanks so far for all the replies. Here's a bit of background information.

My dive centre is located on the island of Madeira (direct translation into english is 'Rock'), I am located in a hotel with two jetties. My 'house reef' is made up of boulder type rocks that are a mix of, rocks that have slid into the ocean and wave breakers to protect the hotel from storms during the winter.

I have already done some modifications to the reef by creating refuge areas for some fish and suspending buoys in the water column to attract the local barracuda. Along with laying some lines with frayed knots in for any passing seahorses to attach on to that get pushed off the sea grass that is further along the coast.

This has had a fully positive effect from what I can tell over the past couple of years. But during this past winter there was a major storm that destroyed a large area of the hotels concrete area, washing a lot of the wave breakers deeper into the ocean and had an adverse effect on the algae at the time. That in turn destroyed a relatively large chunk of the food web.

I believe that a two pronged plan is in order, create more sheltered areas for spawning sites, and introducing a small amount of food into the food web to promote growth on the basic scale of the food web.

(maybe it wasn't such a simple question after all :confused:)

Me thinks I might have opened a can of worms here.... some one get the coffee on :coffee:
 
Not that the following suggestion is in any way a thing you can do today, unlike your current project, but the fairly universal benefits of marine protected zones are more and more being recognized, beacuse they benefit both the sport divers and the commercial and sport fishermen. Granted my experience is in tropical, coral reef areas, though.

Catch increases, and diversity increases. I have lived in several areas where the initial resistance to protected zones by fishermen has later turned to vocal support after seeing that fshermen personally benefit greatly as well.

I think somewhere in here is the idea going forward of how to leverage the real environmental interests of fishermen (even if they are only concerned with catch yields) into postitive wildlife protection in the way hunters are always a big part of land based environmental protection. Maybe the commercial fishing aspect skews the equation too much, though.

It would be nice, though, if we could somehow leverage companies dependence ocean health into plans with universal benefits on a large scale.
 
I think the only way you should feed fish on the reef is by puking through your reg.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/

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