A New England Aquarium researcher has enlisted the help of area pet stores to build support for the “ecofriendly” trade of Amazonian ornamental fish.

Eric Bland

For the last 30 years, native people living along the Rio Negro river in the Amazon rainforest have been harvesting the inch-long cardinal tetra fish, one of the most common ornamental fish found in pet stores and home aquariums around the world.

The export of tens of millions of this crimson and blue-striped fish from Brazil every year brings in so much money for the native people that they have been able to ban more environmentally destructive industries, such as logging, ranching, farming, and mining, in an area of the Amazon the size of Pennsylvania.

But new commercial tetra fish farms in Florida, Singapore, and other parts of the world are threatening the livelihood of the caboclos (“river dwellers” in Portuguese). Without the income from the tetra fish trade, the fear is that the caboclos will have to turn to these other industries for income.

Scott Dowd, a cardinal tetra fish researcher at the New England Aquarium, thinks the way to save the trade of the wild tetra fish is to get the fish certified as “fair trade” fish, similar to the way some brands of coffee and cocoa are certified as being produced with sustainable farming practices and with fair pricing schemes for the farmers.

“It gives the [ornamental fish] industry a good name, supporting sustainably sourced fish,” said Dowd.

But would consumers be interested in buying fair-trade fish instead of farm-raised fish? After all, conventional wisdom says that large-scale fishing from the wild can lead to extinction. That’s not the case with the cardinal tetra fish, which have short, life cycles lasting one to two years, producing a new generation of many millions of fish every year in the Rio Negro.

To gauge consumer response to wild tetra fish, Dowd conducted some simple experiments in 10 New England pet stores. He placed farm-raised and wild cardinal tetras in separate tanks sitting side by side in the pet store. Each tank was labeled either “farm-raised” or “ecofriendly.” He made sure pet-store workers were able to answer customers’ questions about the differences between the otherwise identical fish.

The pet stores priced both types of tetras as they normally would. The fish turned out to cost the same, about $4 each. Over a two-month period in the fall, shopkeepers kept track of how many customers bought each type of fish.

At this point, Dowd, who has worked on cardinal tetras for more than 16 years, only has preliminary data from the pet stores. ”So far, word of mouth response [from the pet stores] has been positive,” said Dowd. “Retailers are enthusiastic and consumers are favoring the eco-labeled fish.”

Fair trade products often cost a little more because of the certification process. The next step in Dowd’s experiments is to see if customers are willing to pay a little extra for wild cardinal tetra fish.