"The simple truth is that no animals are suitable to be held captive in a tank. Sharks, other fish, and invertebrates who are forced to live in an urban environment are constantly bombarded by a variety of stressful insults to their senses and, as our previous letter outlined, suffer greatly from inadequate tank sizes and being denied everything that is natural and important to them. The intended dimensions of Echo Brickell's planned tank—a 23-foot-by-12-foot "habitat"—are woefully inadequate and fall far short of the minimum size that has been suggested to allow sharks to adopt normal swimming patterns and exhibit normal types of behavior. Moreover, the possibility of transferring these sharks to larger facilities at a later time would supply little relief, given the negative impact of stressful transportation. Sharks are actually fairly delicate animals, and it's not uncommon for elasmobranchs to die during transport or shortly thereafter from any number of factors. The aquarium industry is a multimillion-dollar trade that profits from denying animals meaningful lives while at the same time damaging ecosystems. Extracting fish from the oceans devastates local ecosystems by depleting reefs of fish who are responsible for balancing those systems. Without the fish, the reefs cannot survive—and we cannot survive without reefs. Many fish are bred on factory-style farms that may produce more than 250 million fish a year in extreme confinement. Severe crowding contributes to unsanitary, stressful, and disease-ridden conditions, with mortality rates as high as 80 percent for some marine tropical fish. This means that for every one fish who manages to make it to a tank, four have died. Wild-caught fish suffer immensely when they're taken from their natural environment and thrown into artificial habitats. Any animal trapped in a tank will suffer—and will probably die prematurely."