With wild caught mandarins so frequently in poor condition, one man decided to start a UK-based breeding program.
ROBIN MANNION Founder of Pholium Maricultre UK based in Falmouth.
FIRSTLY, I SHOULD introduce myself. My name’s Robin Mannion and I am the founder of Pholium Mariculture UK. After managing the aquarium at a clownfish research project in Tahiti I returned to the UK. I was dismayed to discover how few captive-bred marine fish were available here, and that there wasn’t any commercial breeding happening in the UK at all. A shocking 90% of all reef fish for domestic aquaria are wild caught, and I suspect that number is even greater for the UK.
Breeding benefits
Captive bred fish have many ethical and practical advantages over wild caught—the most obvious one being that taking millions of fish off the reef is simply not sustainable. These issues range from the damage that can be caused to the reef and fish during collection, to the significant carbon footprint attached to getting fish from reef to home tank.
Many wild fish don’t even make it this far, with huge amounts dying during one of the many import chains. Having seen this first-hand, it’s pretty disturbing. On arrival at retailers, wild fish are often in poor health, frequently laden with parasites, often resulting in a bleak future for such awesome animals.
Captive bred fish have none of these downsides, a net benefit for both the aquarist and the environment. Captive bred fish don’t diminish wild populations, tend to carry zero parasites, are of a young age, have a very low carbon footprint, and are trained from the start to accept frozen and pellet foods. On top of these benefits, captive bred fish have all of the same charm as their wild cousins.
With this in mind, in 2020 I started designing a small but space-efficient aquaculture facility in my garage with the goal of trying to figure out how to breed ten popular reef species for the UK market. The garage would need to be fully insulated to contain the heat—something I’m considerably glad I did when factoring in the outrageous energy price hikes in recent times.
As you can imagine this was quite an ambitious project, requiring a significant investment of both money and time, so it’s lucky that I am a serious fish addict. Having a separate full-time job didn’t deter me from my goal, and by the end of 2021 I had finished the build—complete with three separate broodstock systems, two larval systems, two grow-out systems, and a live food production area. I was now ready to start acquiring broodstock and take
