yes
they are cool
what is the ethical problem even, some animal rights thing?
animals have rights in proportion to their ability to do cool things
the fish in the exhibit are privileged

Yes, because they are helping to preserve many living animals which are threatened or endangered in the wild

>>16965372
I think the biggest way this argument tends to play out is "value provided by knowledge and awareness of specific animals, and the funding raised by aquariums to help them (in the wild)" vs "negative value provided of the quality of life of fish 'meant to have larger natural ranges' than is realistically capable of being provided by an aquarium, and the mis-allocation of funds in maintaining the aquarium(s) vs directly spending it on (further) supporting wild animal populations" in some flavour or another. Please provide other points in favour of/against the point outside of this scope, I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.
I'm personally in favour in this framework, so I'm curious what other anons have to say.

>>16965372
They don't normally live in shallow water and have shortened life spans in aquariums.

>>16965372
If you eat meat or use animal products you can't really morally oppose aquariums since growing animals just to kill them is worse than growing animals to look at them. Even if you don't your energy use if you are reading this is almost certainly doing more harm to animals than a zoo or an aquarium would. If you do then you probably shouldn't have a problem with them either. Animals are for us to do with as we please, unusual cruelty should be avoided on principle but aquariums/zoos offer a service for which there's no realistic replacement. If you have the choice between two venues then pick the one with better facilities though.

technically no
we backtrack ethical lines because we like to think enviroment is open season and that we can't stop people from exploiting it, which is already giving too much agency to people and nothing to animals

if we are really considering the impact of having animals in zoos as a purely moral question we have to go back and ask by what right do we have to exploit the enviroment in such a way that necesitate the need to extract endangered animal in the first place
so it was never about ethics but how much we ground we are willing to give for the veil of care, and frankly it's abysmal, in a more just society, animals will get majority of earth's land and we would strictly enforce interaction with them, but since we believe we have final say now, technically anything is ethical as it is our framework to decide

>>16965372
You see that group of yellow fish right in front of the whale shark's mouth? They grew too large so the Georgia Aquarium killed them.

>>16965372
Yeah, up until really large mammals in enclosures that are not ideal for them.

>>16965433
Once had a conversation with the director of the Georgia Aquarium about the ethics of it. His view was that animals have "group rights" and "individual rights". Zoos and aquariums promote group rights by educating the public, caring for animals that can't live in the wild, and producing offspring that can be used to repopulate declining wild populations. That is balanced against individual rights, which vary by species. A clown fish in a large enclosure like the Georgia Aquarium has no concept of not being in its natural habitat. Its individual rights aren't being infringed upon through suffering. But things get more complicated when you get to things like the whale shark that normally would have a large range over which to swim or highly intelligent animals like beluga whales and dolphins, both of which are aware that they're being held in captivity.

>>16965610
Larger than the shark?

>>16966031
No, just not cute little fish anymore. Even in OP's photo they're starting to get larger than what the aquarium wanted. When it first opened, it was probably two dozen of the little yellow fish swimming in a cloud in front of the whale sharks. It was an unexpected crowd favorite. As they grew, there were too many of them for the small number of whale sharks, so most of them were culled. In the wild, predation, disease, and lack of resources would have kept their numbers in check.
I haven't had inside info in a long time but I think they didn't simply get into a cycle of adding new juvenile fish while killing the older ones, they just culled as necessary and didn't replaced them. IIRC, in nature, those fish help keep the whale sharks free of parasites, which is a lesser problem in a controlled aquarium.

>>16966014
I like that last point, I don't think it's entirely fair to conflate aquariums directly for that reason. The small aquarium with a few river species in a proper enclosure can't be compared with large scale ocean containers because of the scale of individual rights being infringed/respected. The better question to ask would be more along the lines of "Which fish are and are not ethically defensible to hold in captivity for the sake of awareness of their species as a whole?"