J Paul Johnson
Do you doubt, for a millisecond, that fish are among nature’s most astonishing creatures? Dozens of deep-sea nature documentaries and photographs prove it so. Those lucky enough to have dived among these exotic creatures have witnessed their beauty first-hand. So too have those aquarium owners and collectors who have kept such fish captive for decades. It’s their pastime that is the subject of the new documentary Aquariums: The Dark Hobby, now available to stream on digital platforms. The processes by which those creatures are, for lack of a better word, harvested are nothing less than heinous.
Most of Aquariums: The Dark Hobby is set in the Hawai’ian Islands, where the “treasure of Hawai’i” —the ornamental fish that populate its coral reef—swim, eat, sleep, and even communicate, work, and play. One particular breed of the more than 1,800 there serves as the piscine equivalent of a car wash, with other fish lining up by the dozens for their services, a kind of deep clean of ocean detritus. Current scientific research—expanding rapidly with advances in technology—is revealing that fish like these have intelligence, can recognize human faces, feel pain, and make plans. For it to continue, these fish need to be able to live, and thrive, in their native habitat.
But the aquarium trade is busy and profitable. It’s a multi-million dollar business, and those who capture and traffic reef fish for hobbyists’ tanks do so, according to Aquariums: The Dark Hobby, without concern for the well-being of the fish, the reef, or even the earth. The Hawai’i aquarium trade has been catching reef fish for U.S. and global hobby tanks for decades, largely without catch limits or constraints on rare or vanishing species. The film is at its best when documenting the methods by which these fish are harvested. One involves using cyanide: sodium cyanide tablets crushed into a bottle of water let divers squirt the mix at a fish, stunning it without killing it, and making it easy prey for capture. No matter to the traders that overdosing (the practice is commonplace and largely ungoverned) will kill fish and poison the reef’s fragile corals.
The second method is no less surprising and equally heinous: using dynamite to explode a reef into powder. Those fish that survive the blast—many don’t—are stunned, covered in coral dust, and gathered up to sell. The reef itself is decimated, littered with the corpses of those fish that don’t survive. The documentary’s footage of an exploded reef looks practically apocalyptic. Sadly, even when, like in Finding Nemo, those harvested fish ultimately end up in an aquarium, they do so with other fish with whom they have never shared a habitat, and frequently do not survive either their new environment or each other.
To its credit, Aquariums: The Dark Hobby efficiently and dramatically documents these processes through a traditional but effective combination of methods: participatory interviews, archival and new footage, onscreen graphics and text, and a modicum of voice-over narration. Especially effective is the ebullient Robert Wintner, aka “Snorkel Bob,” a writer, activist, and reef diver who has dedicated his life and livelihood to reef recovery and the global campaign to ban the aquarium trade. He’s a character full of compassion, quirks, and energy.
The other supportive figures include Kimokeo Kapahulehua, a Kapuna elder and wisdom keeper; Wilfed (WIlly) Kaupiko, the Mayor of Milolilii, the last fishing village on the Big Island of Hawai’i and also a Kapuna elder; Professor Gail Grabowsky, Director of the Environmental Studies program at Chaminade University in Honolulu; and Ben Williamson, senior international media director for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They’re a dedicated and knowledgeable group who make the collective case that fish harvesting drastically reduces ocean population, upends the hierarchy of marine wildlife, and decimates the ecosystem. Together with other Native Hawai’ians, conservationists, and scientists, they are fighting to outlaw, or at the very least, monitor and regulate reef fishing.
Aquariums: The Dark Hobby would benefit a bit from including the perspectives of those who collect or even trade in aquarium fish. Not that their side necessarily has much merit, but without that perspective included, it’s hard to even fathom why, in the preponderance of evidence demonstrating its harm, anyone with a conscience could possibly engage in such activity. What do these collectors and breeders think or believe? From this film, you will not know and can only guess.
One also wonders if an onscreen introduction—from producer Martin Sheen, filmed in that Covid-era Zoom mode we’d all surely now move past and telling viewers about to watch the film because it’s an important film to watch—is at all necessary. Any film surely should stand on its own without its celebrity-activist producer telling viewers they need to watch what they have already elected to watch.
Admittedly, those are quibbles. Aquariums: The Dark Hobby largely does its job: to demonstrate the means by which exotic reef fish are harvested and the damage done in the process. At any given moment, the film claims, some 28 million fish are in the pipeline from point of capture to home hobbyist tank. The film’s own approach may be conventional and the participants largely a like-minded group of advocates, but it will nonetheless convince the unacquainted the importance of its subject and prove a popular educational film for the subject’s advocates as they continue their decades-long battle to regulate—or perhaps even someday terminate—the practice of harvesting fish for capture and display.
