OnSafari for LIONFISH
With blessings from government regulators and conservation groups, underwater hunters are trying to rid Atlantic waters of this latest invader.
By Capt. Spud Woodward A
MERICANS HAVE a love-hate relationship with non-native
plant and animal species. Some — the zebra mussel, water hyacinth, and gypsy moth — are pests, costing us hundreds of millions of dollars annually to battle their adverse impacts on our daily lives and our envi- ronment. Others — corn, ring- necked pheasant, and willow tree, for example — are welcome additions and a valuable source of food, shelter, and recreation. As a lifelong resident of Georgia — the Peach State — I find it humorous that peaches are actually native to China. It seems peach seeds worked their way up the Silk Road to Europe and eventually made their way to North America courtesy of early French and Spanish explorers. By the 1700s, newly arriving European settlers just assumed that peach trees were native and never gave them a second thought. While I’m quite fond of peaches and a few of the other non-native plants and animals living in my home state, I’m not happy about one of the latest invaders — the lionfish. The tale of this fish is a fascinating, yet frightening story of how a seemingly benign native of the Indian and South Pacific oceans is wreaking ecological havoc in the Atlantic Ocean.
THE GREAT ESCAPE
When Hurricane Andrew smashed into south Florida in 1992, it left a trail of devastation putting the storm in the record books. The next year, divers found the first lionfish in the waters of
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to survive, but to actually expand far beyond south Florida.
SEAFAVORITES.COM
The tale of this fish is a fascinating, yet frightening story of how a seemingly benign native of the Indian and South Pacific oceans is
wreaking ecological havoc in the Atlantic Ocean.
south Florida. While this discovery piqued the interests of many, no one took the sudden occurrence of this red- and-white striped fish as a threat. Assuming the fish were liberated when an aquarium washed away in Andrew’s storm surge, experts believed the few escapees would eventually die-off or succumb to predation. Little did they know the lionfish was endowed with attributes that would not only allow it
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I got my first call about a lionfish in 1998, when I was still a senior marine biologist for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. A friend diving an offshore area known as the Brunswick Snapper Banks had speared a strange looking fish he thought to be a lionfish. Having seen the species in captivity, he knew to avoid the beautiful, ribbon- like but very venomous spines. Wisely, he left it on his spear gun until he surfaced and safely deposited it in an ice chest.
Skeptical, but curious, I retrieved the specimen and identified it as a red lion- fish, Pterois volitans. Just to be sure, I sent the fish to a Georgia Southern Univer- sity ichthyologist for verification. A phone call confirmed the fact that lion- fish were present on the natural reef communities off Georgia. Over the next couple of years, lionfish sightings became so commonplace that the novel- ty wore off, and the phone calls ceased. By 2000, divers were spotting lionfish
along the Atlantic Coast from Miami to New England and east to Bermuda. Soon, sightings in the Bahamas made it evident that the species had crossed the Gulf Stream. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the lionfish has established populations throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean in numbers far beyond anything seen in the species’ native waters. In some instances, the esti- mated density of lionfish is more than 1,000 individuals per acre of reef habitat.
TIDE
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