To kill or not to kill lionfish in the Caribbean and Florida?

[Russell Bowyer]

As the t-shirts say, "Kill em and grill em" - or ceviche is good too. But when we're with a group that is hunting lionfish we go in the opposite direction. We have no interest in hunting them and don't want to get in between sharks and bloody fish.

I agree, can get a bit fraught around hungry sharks that are feasting - you never know what they're going to bite next

 

[Russell Bowyer]

I can't believe nobody has posted this yet.... it's old news, highly impractical, and limited for other reasons, but it is still a pretty neat idea...


Jay

Looks like a reasonable idea, but seems a bit slow to capture the fish

 

[Clayton122]

I'd like to open a new topic on whether or not lionfish in the Caribbean and Florida should be killed by scuba divers?

For those of you that are not aware, lionfish were introduced into the waters around the Caribbean and Florida by accident. So they are not indigenous to the area. This means that they are breeding and growing in numbers at an alarming rate.

The rate of increase is being limited by divers and enthusiasts killing them. I myself have killed them on my trips to Barbados and Antigua.

However, killing creatures never comes easy to me. I justify it by the fact that they are 'destroying' local fauna in a way that indigenous creatures are not prepared for or have grown or evolved to deal with. Plus the lionfish we killed we sent to local restaurants.

As an aside, if you've not eaten lionfish, they are very tasty indeed! Probably one of the best fish that I've eaten.

The other problem this does cause is with regard to shark interaction. When I was in Antigua last October, one of the dive group speared a lionfish and within a short space of time we were joined by a reef shark. This shark was intent on eating the speared fish, which it did in the end and took it off the end of the spear.

An exhilarating experience to witness as I was right next to where this took place so the shark came within a few feet of us. But is this good or bad for divers? Possibly if you're not too keen on shark interaction not good. Not sure how this interaction would have gone if that shark was a tiger shark! Which I know are in places like Antigua.

Thoughts and comments would be appreciated.

I dont think this is a good idea. Chumming the water with dead lion fish while your diving seems like it might attract the wrong kind of attention to the area..

 

[Russell Bowyer]

I dont think this is a good idea. Chumming the water with dead lion fish while your diving seems like it might attract the wrong kind of attention to the area..

I don't think I said to chum the water with lionfish, as I agree this wouldn't be good. I don't think I'd like to freely dive in chummed water with frenzied sharks!

 

[stretchthepenn]

The current research seems to indicate that Yes, you can feed a wounded/dead lionfish to a shark or a large grouper, but that is not the same as teaching them to hunt the lionfish by themselves. In fact, it also has negative consequences; from one publication: "Lad Akins of the Reef Environmental Education Foundation, a Florida-headquartered organization of divers and marine enthusiasts, said he believes feeding lionfish to native predators in the Cayman Islands or anywhere else is dangerous. “A number of people have been bitten, sometimes badly, by conditioned predators. The dive industry, regulatory agencies and resource managers have come out against the unsafe and unproven practice of feeding lionfish to predators,” Akins said."

The presentation I saw addressed those objections; the presenter was taking pains to encourage sharks to learn that lionfish are edible but to also prevent sharks from associating spearfishers with food.

 

[100days-a-year]

Robot is a waste of grant money better spent incentivizing derbies.As are trap studies,we know they work but are we willing to deal with the bycatch. Waiting around for local predators to "discover" them seems foolish as well,given the predators in areas they are native to haven't evolved that way yet and it has been a while.

 

[BDSC]

I watched the video a few pages back with lots of lionfish all over the wreck. No telling how long they have been there. Maybe years? Guess what else I saw, lots of small schooling fish as well as other fish around.

 

[shoredivr]

And how many of the initial lionfish in Florida were dumped in the ocean by people when the fish outgrew their aquariums.....

 

[CT-Rich]

And how many of the initial lionfish in Florida were dumped in the ocean by people when the fish outgrew their aquariums.....

There is no telling how they came to be released in FL. Some Tropical invasives were released by owners. Some escaped breeding ponds (I believe that is how walking catfish were introduced). It has also been hypothesized that they escaped when homes were destroyed by hurricane Andrew in 1992.

I am curious what the starting population was. Has anyone done any genetic studies on how large the seed population was?

 

[Soloist]

There is no telling how they came to be released in FL.

Here is one possibility regarding ballast water transfer I was made aware of several years ago. However, NOAA believes the aquarium trade is the biggest culprit.

The Indo-Pacific Red Lionfish was first reported off the Florida coast in 1985, following which it has spread across much of the SE USA, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea. Lionfish negatively impact fish and invertebrate assemblages and abundances, thus further spread is cause for concern. To date, the fish has not been reported on the Pacific coast of North or Central America. Here we examine the possibility of ballast water transfer of lionfish from colonized areas in the Atlantic Ocean to USA ports on the Pacific coast. Over an eight-year period, we documented 27 commercial vessel-trips in which ballast water was loaded in colonized sites and later discharged untreated into Pacific coast ports in the USA. California had the highest number of discharges including San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles-Long Beach. A species distribution model suggests that the probability of lionfish establishment is low for the western USA, Colombia and Panama, low to medium for Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, medium to high for mainland Ecuador, and very high for western Mexico, Peru and the Galapagos Islands. Given the species’ intolerance of freshwater conditions, we propose that ballast water exchange be conducted in Gatún Lake, Panama for western-bound vessels carrying ‘risky’ ballast water to prevent invasion of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Possible Ballast Water Transfer of Lionfish to the Eastern Pacific Ocean