Blue Heron Bridge
While at the Eastern Academy of Scuba Education (EASE), located in Vero Beach, FL, I quickly learned about the Blue Heron Bridge. The bridge is an intercostal waterway just inside the Lake Worth Inlet. In Florida, it’s become a sort of shore diving legend among divers. For macro-photographers the bridge is legendary as a spot to get close ups of seahorses, frogfish, pipefish and even octopus and squid. While attending EASE, I had the pleasure of visiting the bridge a few times and it somehow reminded me of the shore diving atmosphere on the island of Bonaire, just with a lot more traffic, no gin clear water or beautiful female Dutch dive masters; okay it didn’t remind me of Bonaire. Recently though, the Blue Heron Bridge has erupted in locked horns between divers and those collecting fish for their marine aquarium. During a Facebook rant, one diver spoke about how he forced a collector to return a seahorse he had caught for his aquarium. What really outraged the diver is the fact that collecting marine life around Blue Heron Bridge is illegal. Except that it isn’t. It is illegal to collect fish for industry or sale, but private aquarists can obtain a permit from Palm Beach County to collect marine life for their own aquariums. In reality, it’s very plausible that the person the diver accosted was collecting marine life legally, and under no legal obligation to return what he had collected. Events around the Blue Heron Bridge have made me question a practice that many aquarists are familiar with, collecting animals from the wild and putting them in our aquariums. 
I’d be a hypocrite to bash wild collection. As a child, I collected tadpoles, fish, crayfish and a variety of other animals from the streams and lakes around my home. My cousins and I would spend hours collecting crayfish, sometimes well over a dozen, from a large stream that ran through my grandmother’s property. In many ways, collecting animals locally was how I started gaining traction as an aquarist. Wild collection by aquarists isn’t an uncommon thing. I know aquarists from all over who collect local wildlife and keep them in their aquarium. When done by someone capable of identifying marine life and caring for it, the result can be quite good. 
Problems arise when someone with little respect for the animal, and ignorance about how to care for it, heads out and starts collecting.… More:
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