Haven't posted in a long while (just "lurked") since I get the feeling that the opinions of people who are not aquarium fish traffickers are not valued very highly in this forum, but since someone asked for info on live reef food fish sources on the web, here are some:
There are indeed some resources on the live reef food fish trade online, although no discussion forums that I know of. SPC (Secretariat of the Pacific Community) used to have a list server, but I don't think it is active these days. Go to
www.conserveonline.org and search for live reef food fish trade and you will turn up a lot of documents. The 2001 "Collaborative Strategy for the Live Reef Food Fish Trade" document has a lot of information, as do the posted papers from some workshops that MAC and TNC have organized as part of their live reef food fish standards projects (yes, I know, they are evil "Eco-NGOs"). The SPC Live Reef Fish Information Bulletin has lots of articles on this topic, and links, but they haven't published an issue since April 2003. All past editions are available in PDF on their website. NACA has lots and lots of info on grouper aquaculture, and links as well.
Fishing for groupers with cyanide does indeed appear to be pretty widespread in Southeast Asia, although some researchers argue that it is the extreme overfishing, esp of spawning aggregations, that is the greatest problem, and cyanide just helps make that overfishing more efficient (although you don't need cyanide to catch them in an aggregration!) Napoleon wrasse are so dumb that one observer saw fishers in Kiribati catching them by hanging over the front of a banca and putting hooks in their mouths by hand, or so I heard.
Cyanide fishing is bad, whatever you are catching with it. I guess one difference between MOs and live food fish is that there is that there is more potential for pressure from MO consumers and traffickers to clean up the act since long-term survival is more of an issue for MOs (live reef food fish only have to live long enough to get to HK and get cooked), and there is more of an environmental sensitivity, or so goes the conventional wisdom, among western consumers than there is among consumers in HK and adjacent areas of southern China (where they eat all manner of wild creatures, no matter how endangered).
The MAC-TNC effort to get industry interested in best practice standards is an attempt to prove this conventional wisdom wrong by trying to show how people can make money on this fishery while doing it without cyanide and limits on effort (as is the case in the Australia plectropomus leopardus fishery). Given the fact that MAC is so reviled in this forum, you may dismiss this effort as just another money grab by some evil eco-NGOs, but I don't see anyone else out there actually engaging with the industry people and trying to get them to change.
At a minimum, the effort has at least gotten the World Bank and the government of Indonesia talking about the issue in the development of a big coral reef loan/grant that is being finalized for Indonesia.
Some people say "just ban the trade" in live reef food fish, but that view reveals considerable naivete about the capacities of the governments in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. They do not have the capacity, political will, or resources to even effectively enforce existing bans on illegal logging, terrestrial wildlife smuggling (which is an epidemic), etc. Indonesia is currently proposing completely closing the land border between Kalimantan and Malaysia as a last-ditch effort to stem the flow of illegal logs, but it won't work because Indonesia doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to police that border.
Live reef food fish catches and exports are not even really recorded by the government.
Hope this is all useful.