With regard to our laws in the Bahamas most of them are fisheries laws and don't particulary pertain to hobbyist pursuits. However, the laws regarding taking from the reefs are very clear. You will go to jail if you are caught as it is illegal to harvest coral of any kind from the reefs. Unfortunately, like Krish says there really is no one to catch you. We teach ourselves our own control. For those of you familiar with GARF I believe in alot that they say and after seeing lion fish in the Florida Keys I would not want to have them in or waters so the no importation laws on the books of saltwater fish help to preserve our reefs fauna and fisheries. Fact is we have more than our fair share of ignorant people that would simply dump Nemo into the ocean when they got tired of him When Krish and I go on collection forays we are very careful with what we disturb and we never have taken directly from the reef. Very often after the winter rages we get down here the sea offers up alot of frags which we collect and the zoo's we have are a shallow water specimen that even stands periodic exposures at low tide making them extremely hardy. Some of the pictures he has taken from my tank are of encrusting gorgonian frags that I grew from very small pieces we found near the shoreline. The greatest challenge for me is bringing some of the corals back to life. This summer we have talked about going into what I call coral grave yards which are areas in about 15-30 feet of water where huge sections of staghorn and elkhorn corals have died off leaving "live rock" encrusted with new corals like brain and gorgonians and a few others. Most Atlantic corals are very endangered so my feeling is if I can grow a captive stock out of naturally ocurring frags I may pass them on to other reefers and not encourage uneducated pillage that occurrs in other parts of the world.
