Scubaism

A Miami man will forfeit his boat and spend 10 months in jail for illegally harvesting brilliantly colorful corallimorphs, prized for saltwater aquariums, from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Alexandre Alvarenga, 40, was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan, who accepted his guilty plea for illegally taking 900 living specimens of Ricordea florida so that he could sell them.

The investigation began in November 2006 when two Germans were caught at Miami International Airport with 500 specimens. They told investigators they were planning to sell them in the Dusseldorf aquarium trade.

Chiseling the rocks in chunks, and disturbing the protected coral, is illegal. The bigger chunks enable them to be sold in clumps, which are more lucrative than individual ones.

A single Ricordea polyp of gold or orange sells on the Web for $12 or more.

The Germans told investigators they had helped Alvarenga harvest the protected marine creatures from his 1969 fiberglass-hulled Morgan boat in the waters east of Cudjoe Key.

Investigators planted a Global Positioning System on Alvarenga’s boat to track it during the next two months. On Jan. 25, he was arrested at Cudjoe Key Marina with a load of 400 specimens of the Ricordea florida from sanctuary waters.

The specimens seized from Alvarenga have been kept alive at the Mote Marine Laboratory on Summerland Key. The sanctuary plans to restore them to their natural habitat and repair the damage caused by chiseling them from the seabed. The cost will exceed $78,000.