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ABSTRACT
Ocean life is often portrayed as antithetical to life in the city. Drawing on interviews with coral hobbyists and aquarists, my article focuses on the emergence of the coral aquarium hobby within the urban home. I depict the recent fascination of city dwellers from around the globe with corals, explore the history and contemporary characteristics of those who propagate them as well as their reasons for doing so, and examine the urban coral industry. I also argue that corals reveal the problems with existing regulatory modes of classifying animals. The corals who live in urban tanks are not exactly wild, nor are they domesticated; they are not exactly pets, nor are they plants or ornaments; and since they are clones, it is hard to determine where one individual starts and another begins – and what death even means in this context, in which production and consumption are intertwined. Finally, while tropical corals are dying at alarming rates in the oceans, their numbers in the city are on the rise. Instead of heading to tropical islands to experience corals up close, coral enthusiasts are transplanting themselves into the city as their corals require careful attention to survive in the urban environment.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Colin Foord and Julian Sprung for their patient support and infectious love of corals. My gratitude also extends to the journal’s excellent anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Irus Braverman is professor of law and adjunct professor in geography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Her books include Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (2009), Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (2012), and Wild Life: The Institution of Nature (2015). Her latest book, Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018), draws on interviews with one hundred coral scientists to explore the emotional and professional challenges facing these scientists in today's political and physical climate.
Notes
1 This use is intentional and meant to encourage readers to reflect on our seemingly neutral linguistic categories and to consider seeing nonhuman animals as subjects.
2 Additionally, I became a coral hobbyist for a short period, during which I regularly visited at the local saltwater reef store and consulted with its manager. For a discussion of my methodology in my research for Coral Whisperers, and more generally, see Braverman, Citation2018, pp. 14–19.
3 However, Fiji’s Ministry of Fisheries banned all harvesting, purchasing, sales and export of live coral and aquarium rock (also known as live rock, coral rock or fossil coral), effective December 28, 2017 (ABC News, Citation2018). In 2018, the Indonesian government issued a blanket ban on all exports of corals, stunning the global ornamental fish industry.
4 The story becomes more complicated when fish enter the picture. ‘It’s the fish that need replacement’, Foord explained. Still, ‘it is more justified to keep a fish alive in a tank than to eat it’, he stipulated. To eat a fish is a luxury for most of us, not subsistence, he added. ‘So unless one’s a vegan, I don’t accept their moral argument against keeping a tank’.
5 Sprung clarified the taxonomy:
Corallimorpharia such as Discosoma, Rhodactis, and Ricordea, and zoantharians such as Zoanthus and Palythoa, are not corals – at least they are not to be confused with scleractinia – but related creatures from coral reefs and coastal habitats, which have served to inspire the aquarium hobby’s interest in corals and coral reefs. Foord (as well as many aquarium hobbyists) often refers to ‘corals’ generically in such a manner that it is inclusive of the abovementioned creatures and even anemones such as the Rock Anemone, Phymanthus crucifer. (Sprung, email communication)