Divers Fight the Invasive Lionfish
July 23, 2015

ERIC JOHNSON, BIOLGIST & LIONFISH RESEARCHER, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA:

It’s likely that the invasion started sometime in the mid-1980s. That’s when the first reported siting was of lionfish, just north of Miami.  You have an animal that once it invades can really increase its population numbers very rapidly. 

Well, lionfish really are sort of the perfect storm.  I think in many ways, as invasive species go, they have a lot of characteristics which make them very successful  in the invaded range.  They reproduce very in life so they reach maturity and grow very rapidly.  They’re capable of dispersing large distances in their egg and larval phase which large ocean currents. 

It is a species that has venomous spines.  They don’t seem to have very native predators or predators in their invaded range here so it is possible that because they are so armored with the venomous spines that they don’t have a lot of natural predators which would lead them to basically not worry about being eaten.

In general, one of the major impacts that we’re going to find from this is essentially the fact that they are eating a whole variety of our native species.  For one, they are removing prey that would’ve been available for many of our native fish stocks like snapper and grouper that are feeding on similar small bodied reef fishes. They are also certainly having a direct predatory impact on many of those smaller reef fishes. And while we don’t fish for those species, those species provide perform important ecological services on the reef.

Very little is known about lionfish biology and ecology. Our research program on lionfish here in northeastern Florida is trying to characterize a lot of the life history traits of lionfish, so we’re looking at things like how fast do they grow, how many times to do they reproduce, how many eggs to they produce. 

Most of the fish that we get for our work is actually through collaboration with local fishermen. Many of those folks are very interested obviously in what’s going on with their ecosystem.  It supports their livelihood and so they’re very eager to help.  For our part, we get to get samples from a huge geographic area that would cost us thousands of dollars to run our own research program.

I think the best chance we have to mitigate the impacts of lionfish is to encourage fishery removals whether that’s through recreational spear fishermen or whether that’s through the development of commercial lionfish fishery, whether that would be through traps or spearfishing or any of these gear types.  But just get some of a larger fraction of these fish out of the water.

I think right now the best strategy we have for controlling the fish is human consumption: if we can increase the amount harvested through a variety of ways, increase demand for this species in both seafood markets, increase demand in terms of restaurants—to get restaurants to carry it.  At this point no one talking about eradication, of course.  But again if you can have enough effort and mitigate, it should be shown in in a relatively small scales that it can dent population and you can see rebounds in the native fish species.