Aquarium-fish harvesting in Hawaii, long contested on environmental and cultural grounds, is moving toward a new crossroads as lawmakers consider a broad ban for the Big Island while state regulators advance a separate plan to reopen collections in limited form.
The Legislature’s action centers on HB 2101, a bill that would stop the fish collections on Hawaiʻi island altogether. The House passed the measure 43-8 and sent it to the Senate, where it has been referred to four committees, a procedural step that signals potential resistance in the upper chamber.
At the same time, state aquatic resource managers are looking to revive Big Island aquarium collections that have been halted for years because of legal disputes. Their proposal would issue a limited number of permits—seven—to Big Island collectors who could take more than 200,000 yellow tang and other species from the reefs each year.
Ron Tubbs, who collected and sold reef fish off Oʻahu for decades before a court ruling halted the practice there in 2021, said his experience was shaped by the aquarium trade’s profit chain. Tubbs said he could typically sell kole, a dark bristletooth tang with a gold ring around its eyes, for about $20 a fish to wholesalers, who then sold it to pet stores for about $40 before the stores sold it for around $60. After aquarium fishing halted on Oʻahu, Tubbs said he spent nearly $100,000 of his retirement savings trying to breed small crustaceans and marine invertebrates in captivity; he later moved to work as an event photographer and mechanic.
Kekoa Alip, a Hawaiʻi island resident who now works in conservation, said the debate is also about what people have seen and what they believe has changed on the water. Alip, who said he harvested yellow tang and kole off Kona when he was a teenager, recalled that “You could see the waves roll with lau’ipala,” referring to yellow tang, and he said the fish were once far more abundant. He also recalled how his harvesting stopped after he and his cousin became concerned about the dwindling fish they saw each time they went diving. Alip later said his decision to stop reflected responsibility rather than earnings, describing it as, “We chose kuleana over cash.”
The Legislature fight has added a policy layer beyond individual collectors, with lobbying and industry testimony moving alongside the ban and the proposed reopening rules. The Pet Advocacy Network, the wire story said, enlisted powerful Hawaii lobbyist Blake Oshiro on Tuesday, the same day the House debated the measure, according to state ethics records. Oshiro’s firm, Capitol Consultants Hawaiʻi, has also lobbied for the group in earlier years under the name Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council. While the proposed ban has drawn hundreds of pages of written testimony mostly supporting it, the story said it had so far received none from the Pet Advocacy Network.
Some industry participants, meanwhile, see the regulatory path as a way to preserve business opportunities while expanding alternatives. The Biota Group, headed by CEO Carsten Buschkühle with a local manager, James Gorke, testified that aquaculture efforts in captivity could reduce reliance on wild harvest. Biota Group told lawmakers, “Aquaculture allows Hawaiian reefs to stay stocked with marine life,” and it added that the practice would still let the iconic animals “educate the world about Hawaii’s reefs.” The company also told the story that Hawaii’s aquaculture sector faces “significant risk and financial loss” amid the push to revive wild harvest.
Debate over the proposals also extends beyond raw fish counts to disagreements about what sustainability means and what evidence should carry the most weight. The aquatics division told the Hawaiʻi Board of Land and Natural Resources in 2024 that, based on fish counts from recent years, limited collections could resume without harming existing population levels. But marine research scientist Alohi Nakachi said such data need to be read alongside changes that small shore-lying communities describe and alongside Indigenous approaches used to manage marine resources.
Nakachi said, “It’s just different knowledge sources, different ways of knowing, and we need to look at them together,” using a term for those who belong to a place’s shoreline stewardship. She added, “It’s holistic. It’s not just the fish,” describing how limu, or seaweed, and the broader reef system can be linked to coral reef health. In her view, even juvenile fish that do not reach adulthood still matter because they serve ecosystem functions.
The state’s proposal to advance rulemaking for limited collections is also tied to public process milestones and ongoing litigation. The wire story reported that an online public hearing on the division’s proposal is slated for March 31, followed by an April 1 in-person hearing at Kealakehe High School in Kailua-Kona. Separately, a group dubbed the Hawaiʻi Island Aquarium Fishers Association sued in 2024, seeking to compel the land board and aquatics division to begin issuing commercial licenses. Their attorney, Los Angeles-based Geoff Davis, said the fishers are entitled to resume harvesting because they fulfilled the environmental review requirements outlined in an earlier court decision.
The story’s central contest in Hawaii now sits between a legislative push to prohibit the aquarium fish trade on the Big Island and an administrative pathway that would allow tightly limited collections under new permits—each side arguing, in different ways, that its approach better protects reef fish and the communities that depend on the ocean.