jade76;178476 wrote: what do the said "regulations" imply? just out of curiosity.
That is a spicy meatball. I will simplify it a lot, because it is not very cut and dry. Essentially, CITES controls endangered species, and many hard corals fall onto this list. CITES provides requirements for international trade. The Kingdom of Tonga has been going through a terrible civil uproar, so the requiremnets were essentially put on the back burner by the Tongan government (or what was left of it). Certain things needed to be clarified, stipulated, and assured (such as collection practices, limits, etc.). Howevere, Since the Tongan government didn't care to provide this documentation, the US was one of teh first to say, "If you aint gonna follow the rules, you can't do business with us". Hence the embargo. Once the governmnet realized that they would lose a HUGE part of their economy by this, they rushed the documents to The Hague, for review. CITES endorsed them, and the USFWS lifted the embargo. It wa quite possible, though that the CITES committee could'ce simply said "no", and then there would be no rock, corals, clams from Tonga.
The agent I was speaking to said there was a similar thing going on with Australian stony corals, so hopefully that wont sting us.
Regarding Ricordia, I would be very interetsed to hear about that. There already is currently VERY STRICT legislation on collection of stonies from the caribbean- in that it is illegal without the permits (which really no one can get). Soft corals and gorgonians can be collected, but (from what I understand), you can take no more than 1 square of rock with any particular soft coral. If this is changing, I would be very curious to see why and what the laws now are.
