When Mike Levy heard that a tsunami had destroyed large parts of coastal southeast Asia in December, he assumed that his store, Tropiquarium in Ocean Township, N.J., wouldn’t be able to get any tropical fish for a long time. But he was wrong.

“A week after it hit, I asked one of my suppliers when we’d be able to get fish again,” said Levy, whose 8,000-square-foot store carries a complete line of fish equipment and accessories, as well as freshwater and saltwater livestock. “And he told me there wasn’t going to be a problem, that he would have a shipment in that week.”

In fact, save for some minor disruptions, the supply of fish from an area that is one of the world’s largest suppliers of both freshwater and saltwater species has remained consistent, said distributors and retailers. Many said they experienced more severe disruptions after last summer’s Florida hurricanes put cichlids in short supply.

That’s because the tsunami struck on the western shores of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. If it had hit on the eastern sides or farther south in Indonesia near Bali, where more fish are taken, the supply would have been more seriously affected, said Mary Middlebrook, owner of Marine Specialties Internationals (Port Hueneme, Calif.), which brings in fish and coral from the Philippines, Indonesia and the Solomon Islands. “Then we’d all be looking for other jobs,” she said.

The most common shortages, said several importers, were in freshwater fish, which are farmed inland in areas where the tsunami flooded everything—not only killing the fish, but destroying the fish ponds. Otherwise, they said, they were able to get saltwater fish and ship them through airports that were far enough away from the catastrophe that flights weren’t affected.

That’s the good news, relatively speaking. The bad news is that many importers, such as Emark Tropical Imports Inc. (Brooklyn, N.Y.), suffered human losses in the disaster. Emark’s Mark Stetz said several divers who provided fish for his company were in the water when the tsunami hit, and are presumed dead. [March 2005 PET AGE]