Since we are discussing a going-on-four-year-old-topic, I thought I would clarify a few things. First, Jonathan Lowrie and I had done a presentation at the National Coral Reef Institute's international scientific conference on coral reef assessment, monitoring, and management on the effects of the aquarium trade in April of 1999 that had encompassed information we had attempted to acquire for at least a year beforehand. We discovered that data on the trade was virtually non-existent and had not been looked at - as we already knew, and the aquarium trade was blissfully ignorant of this aspect. Following our presentation, I continued to investigate and pursue the matter and acquired raw data from the government and sorted through several thousand pages of files.
As it happens, this time period was exactly when other groups had also become interested in assessing the marine aquarium trade, and the now seminal publications and organization that exist (TRAFFIC, WWF, MAC, USCRTF, etc.) were only in progress. In fact, it was only after showing Andy Bruckner this data, which had only been requested from the same source a month beforehand by the first investigating groups, that the anomalies in the trade data became apparent. In part, this very information brought up the inconsistencies and poor methodologies in reporting of the until-then virtually ignored coral trade. So, the numbers I reported in the coral-list thread were ultimately wrong, thankfully, although until then these were the data that showed the need for standardization of reporting according to weight, pieces, live v. dead, etc. It also set the stage for further work that is and has been accomplished on these issues by myself, with others, and, more importantly, by funded and interested parties.
