The seemingly inexhaustible wealth of the oceans have lured men from every corner of the world. At the tender of age of 13, Anecito Mang Cito Casilac explored the bountiful reefs of Cebu, an island province in the Philippines’ Visayas region, to learn the trade of aquarium fishing and earn money for his family.
With the Philippines at the apex of the Coral Triangle, its reefs are some of the richest in the world. With a high concentration of marine shore fish biodiversity per unit area, the country is at the center of the center of marine shore fish biodiversity. Because of its unique location, the Philippines, together with Indonesia, is home to the most reef fish traded in the market for aquaria. These are the attractive colorful creatures usually found in home aquaria and decorative hotel tanks. Catching them has been Mang Cito’s source of livelihood for almost 50 years.
I will never forget my first earnings, Mang Cito told VICE while sitting by the shore waiting for lunch one afternoon in August. He earned PHP4 for three days of work in the 1970s, selling one reef fish for 10 to 50 centavos. That’s around PHP300 ($6.2) today when adjusted for inflation.
Nemo is the most expensive one, he said.
This was half a century ago, or about 30 years before the Pixar film Finding Nemo popularized the clownfish. Based on recent data, most wild clownfish sold in the United States are from the Philippines.
Mang Cito, then, traded education for a life at sea to continue providing for his family as the first-born son.
Even though I only reached Grade 5, I was able to send my siblings to school, he said proudly. He continued to learn the ropes of aquarium fishing from his relatives developing every imaginative method to lure, trap, and catch the most colorful and unique fish species he could find, and sailing to many islands to find reefs with the most variety of fish.
In the latest assessment of the Philippines’ marine ornamental fish industry, over 60 percent of the total supply of these types of fish come from Region 4A, where Batangas is located. According to the same study, an estimated 9 million pieces of marine ornamental fish were sold in the market from 2016 to 2017, which included approximately 1,200 marine species. The most popular ones are green chromis, false percula (common clownfish), and firefish goby. Some threatened species were also recorded to be traded, including the endangered humphead wrasse.
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