I thought of pet fish as a boring subject. We didn’t find the alligator but Lieutenant Fitzpatrick kept talking about these illegal, super-expensive pet fish that were coming into the city and were the bane of his existence. I accompanied Fitzpatrick up to the South Bronx because a man had been trying to sell his alligator on Craigslist. He started to regale me with stories I couldn’t believe: 1,300 turtles living in a swank Tribeca loft, where the guy had no room for a bed a Harlem man living with a tiger and an alligator in the same little apartment! John Fitzpatrick, pet detective! I was doing a story on the exotic pet trade in New York City and called him up one summer afternoon. Talk about John Fitzpatrick and New York’s illegal wildlife trade. Your journey begins in an unlikely place-the Bronx. That backfired, though, because it created the perception of rarity, which spawned a market for this fish in the aquarium trade. But it is an apex predator and a slow-reproducing fish, so it ended up on this list of protected species and was banned from international trade. It wasn’t even considered a particularly good food fish. Back then it was just an ordinary food fish, something people were eating for dinner in the swamp. This is what happened with the Asian arowana. In the 1970s, when the international community began to organize around the idea of protecting endangered species, the impulse was to ban everything. The history of this one single fish encapsulates the history of modern conservation. It’s a dramatic example of a paradox where the fish is largely depleted in the wild but is being bred by the hundreds of thousands each year on farms. The highest price I have heard is $300,000, which supposedly sold to a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party. When I attended the Aquarama International Fish Competition, which is a bit like the Westminster dog show for fish, these 10 rare, albino arowana showed up with a police motorcade, protected by armed guards, to prevent anyone adding poison to the tanks. That resemblance has spawned the belief that the fish brings good luck and prosperity, which is why it has become a highly sought-after aquarium fish. It has large, metallic scales, like coins whiskers that jut from its chin and it undulates like the paper dragons you see in a Chinese New Year’s parade. It is a fierce predator dating back to the age of the dinosaurs. It is a tropical freshwater fish from Southeast Asia that grows three feet long in the wild. The Asian arowana is the world’s most expensive aquarium fish. Tell us about the arowana-aka the dragon fish-and why it has become so valuable. At the center of your story is a fish most of us aren't familiar with.
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