Divers Fight the Invasive Lionfish
July 23, 2015 - The
lionfish is invading Florida's coastal
waters, harming native wildlife and habitat. This non-native species has venomous spines, lacks natural predators, and is able to reproduce quickly, which allows it to dominate other fish species that compete for resources. Divers are helping researchers catch the fish to learn more about its biology and develop ways to control the population.
Read this article on how the invasive and destructive lionfish is resorting to cannibalism.
Transcript
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.