The marine aquarium hobby is a rapidly growing industry that still relies heavily on the collection of reef fishes and shrimps from the wild. The intense and selective collection practices employed have proven destructive to the coral reef habitat; often result in high mortality of collected organisms; and may deplete wild stock populations. The obvious environmentally sound alternative to collecting marine aquarium species is to raise them in captivity.

Commercial propagation of marine ornamentals is not an easy task and is complicated by biological and economical constraints. Many species have not been cultured because of their complex reproductive biology; others can only be raised on an experimental scale; and for those that can be raised in large numbers, production is often not cost-effective.

Reef Culture Technologies has been developing commercial breeding protocols for aquarium reef fish since 2001. At present, we are exclusively working with marine angelfishes, the most prized group of ornamentals in the aquarium trade. The focus of our research is the popular and heavily traded dwarf angelfishes of the genus Centropyge . Numerous endeavors over the last 25 years the larvae have failed to raise this fish and the only supply to the aquarium trade was by wild collection. Our company recently developed a breakthrough culture technology, making the first ever captive-bred dwarf angelfishes available to the hobbyist.

The commercial stage of our rearing technology presently enables us to produce small numbers of dwarf angels for the aquarium trade. However, production costs of commonly traded Centropyge, such as flame angels, lemonpeels and coral beauties, are still too high to compete with pricing of their wild-caught counterparts. In order to compete we have therefore focused our research on rare, higher valued marine angelfishes. Our company is 100 percent privately owned and receives no state or federal funding.

RCT’s immediate, short-term objective is to increase the number of rare, captive-bred angelfish species to the marine aquarium hobby.

The generated income will fund the ongoing research to cost-effectively produce common marine angelfishes, primarily pygmy angelfish species, in higher numbers to compete with wild collection.

Making less common aquarium species competitively available through captive breeding will preserve wild stock populations. Collectors often target rare species of higher value for their profit potential. It has been shown that exploitive collection of such species can significantly reduce their natural abundance on the reef to the point where their total population health may be affected.

Commercial culture protocols are available for clownfishes, dottybacks, sea horses, many cleaner shrimp and goby species and a few other select marine ornamentals. At this time no more than 4 percent of over 1,500 traded marine aquarium fishes and shrimps are captive-bred commercially. The over 1,400 species that have never been cultured, include the butteflyfishes, coral perches, tangs and surgeonfishes, and most wrasses, hawkfishes and marine angelfishes.

RCT’s long-term objective is to develop culture protocols for aquarium species of ecological and economic importance that are presently not farmed commercially.

We intend to increase the number of captive bred species in the marine ornamental trade. Thereby we hope to lessen the aquarium hobby’s dependency on wild-caught reef organisms and reduce the exploitation of the world’s coral reef ecosystems.

Our mission: Preservation through Propagation.