What do you think about CF?

I've seen a few Captive Farmed herps around. What do you think of it? Of course it's better then WC but is it a huge difference from CB.

Captive farmed seems to be a nice way of saying wild caught at the moment. I've seen quite a few amphibians for sale described as captive farmed, even Pachytriton which is obviously not true. I think the wholesalers or importers are using the term for a lot of Asian species for some reason. I know that tortoises and other reptiles are genuinely captive farmed and it's quite easy to find pictures on the web, but there isn't a single shred of evidence to back up these stories about Paddletais, Fire bellied toads, or any of the other amphibians apart from bullfrogs that are farmed in huge numbers for food, but again it's easy to find pictures of bullfrog farms. It's the magical Asian newt and toad farms don't seem to exist.

I agree with Ben, the first issue is certainly the very dubious nature of the claim that the animals are CF at all.
Aside from that, while collecting eggs, larvae or juveniles is less impactful than collecting adults, it still means the exploitation of wild populations in uncertain terms.
Something that to me is a big deal is also the fact that they seem to be distributed through the same importation process than WC animals, that is stored in overcrowded conditions, exposed to who knows what, kept in inadequate conditions and distributed to shops where they receive negligent care. In the end, it's still a mistreated, stressed animal.

I would also be shocked if something like Chinese firebellys were farmed. They've been imported in mass quantity for a long time and unless something prevented them from continuing to do so (like a population decline), I don't see any reason they would bother to farm them. On the other hand, it would be interesting to know how they harvest them. If they've been able to harvest them from the same locations for decades, it may suggest that they are just skimming off the top animals that would have hit carrying capacity anyway. If they have to keep moving to new spots due to population declines, that's obviously something to worry about.

UC Berkley has a really good audio course that teaches about carrying capacity for free online that I found interesting.

The problem with farming many Asian species is rearing them through the terrestrial 'eft' stage. In captivity, with optimal conditions, they can be over it in a year or so. In the wild or 'captive farm' situation where they are inactive for the winters it could easily be five years before they are big enough to satisfy the exporters. Extra feeding and heat are out of the question because they only cost the final owner five bucks or so and at that they've been marked up by collector, animal market, importer, wholesaler and finally pet stores, all those are somehow making a profit so there's certainly no money for actually rearing the animals.

I have a theory that captive farmed is what wholesalers tell pet stores to justify the small size of the animals these days. The Asian WC species I'm seeing in pet stores today are definitely smaller than they were years ago, the obvious explanation for this is there's only small ones left at the collection sites, because most of the old, fully grown adults have gone?

The term Captive Farmed (CF) is not well known everywhere and it can mean very different realities. I feel the word "captive" gives it a good image, not always deserved.
CF rarely appears in global trade statistics and I guess CF are assimiled to CB.

Even CB can be dubious as it can mean Captive Bred (the sense we probably mean here) or Captive Born which could mean from eggs laid by wild caught parents (then virtually synonym of CF). Some people speak about CBB (Captive Bred and Born) to avoid any confusion.

The only way CF could work is if eggs were collected, larvae were raised, and a percentage were released as head started animals back into the wild.

I think Captive farming has been a terrific step forward.

While many salamanders are still not being produced by this meathod and for iucn/cites it is much easier to ship a cf than a wc animal, and thus it is still a drain. The sucess the industry has had with regards to monitors, crocidiles, large boids, dart frogs, and more is too good to simply ignore.

I think CFing depends a lot on how it's done and whether or not it's actually captive farming vs. laundering WC animals. I'm not really familiar with any of the CFing that people seem to be referring to, but I do some captive farming of my own. I can grab an Ambystoma egg mass or part of an egg mass and then raise up the larvae and sell the juveniles, and it's not going to have much of an impact - especially if I take from crowded breeding pools or shallow ones that are likely to dry up. It still has an impact, though, so it's not perfect, and eggs have to be collected every year so it's an ongoing drain. Still better than collecting wild animals to sell by a long shot, though. I'm hoping to eventually get some of my holdbacks to breed on their own, but I need some proper outdoor enclosures for that, so I'll have to see how it goes, but that's getting off topic.

Captive breeding is ideal, but then you still run the problem of taking animals from the wild, generally adults, which hurts a population more than taking eggs or juveniles. The benefit there is that once the adults are collected, that's hopefully the end of it. And while taking a handful of animals isn't going to really do much damage for most species, there's still that removal at first, especially if the starting animals were purchased rather than collected by yourself since then you're supporting the person collecting the animals and they have more reason to do it again.

Basically, there's negative aspects for removing any animals from the wild. Captive breeding is the best in the long run, but some kinds of captive farming are almost as good; other kinds aren't going to be much better. Wild collecting can definitely damage populations, though, so alternatives are definitely needed.

As to what Coastal Groovin said, that's generally illegal in most states. Headstarting might sound like a good idea, but you could end up introducing disease or parasites into the wild population doing that. Animals can pick up disease in captivity from food or from other animals you might have, and that can be really harmful to wild populations. Unless you're taking from rare species that aren't really numerous (just don't do this) or you're taking thousands and thousands of eggs, you probably didn't really have much of an impact on the number of animals that reached maturity anyhow. I do some egg mass surveying with a friend at the university I work at, and in a couple ditches near a wetland, we tend to find 500+ A. maculatum egg masses each year. If you took one, or even fifty(not that anyone would ever need fifty), you're probably not going to see much of a difference in the number of juveniles, even discounting the acres of beaver pond that are likely full of eggs, too. It's certainly better than taking fifty adults; after a few years of that, you'd definitely start seeing lower numbers of eggs each year, but if you're farming the right species that can afford to lose a few eggs, you shouldn't really be having much of an impact to need to offset with headstarting.