All across South-East Asia, thousands of fishermen are poisoning exquisite coral reefs with cyanide. They crush a couple of sodium cyanide tablets into a plastic container of water, then dive in among the reefs and squirt the toxic liquid into the faces of any fish that catch their eye. The poison is concentrated enough to knock out the fish without killing them, making them easy to catch in a net, or even with bare hands. Hours later, the fish are recovering on a plane to Hong Kong, where customers in restaurants will pay $200 or more to choose a colourful coral trout or grouper swimming in a tank and have it cooked and served up at their table. Other fish might end up in aquaria in North America or Europe. But the reef itself-the coral polyps and algae that underpin these "rainforests of the oceans" -pays a heavy price too. Roughly a square metre of reef is destroyed for every live fish caught using cyanide, says biologist Sam Mamauag of the International Marinelife Alliance in the Philippines. Cyanide, he says, has turned many of the most biologically diverse reefs on the planet into marine deserts.
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