AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums About Belize Nature Scourge of the Lionfish

The plain truth is that we will never irradicate the lionfish from our waters. We can control, we can decimate but as broadcast spawners we will never wipe them out...I agree agressively hunt them, eat the hell out of them yum, but they are established...

VIDEO: Lionfish spearing in Southern Belize

Removing the invasive Lionfish, very sustainable and delicious to eat!!!

Vendors sceptical about lionfish

University of Southampton postgraduate researcher Fadilah Ali showing how to prepare lionfish to be turned into delicious lionfish and bake.

Lionfish and bake may taste delicious but the misconception that it is poisonous remains the biggest obstacle for its acceptance as an alternative to shark and bake.�This is the view of University of Southampton postgraduate researcher Fadilah Ali. Ali, the PhD candidate who has dissected more than 10,000 lionfish, told the Sunday Guardian via e-mail that the lionfish was not poisonous, but that the tips of its barbs contained venom instead. If it stuck someone, it would be painful but was not fatal, and no one has died from it.�

Ali said throughout the Caribbean there was a great misconception that the lionfish was poisonous and as a result there was a general unwillingness to eat the fish.�She said education via the media was the only way to clear up these misconceptions and also prove to people the benefits of eating lionfish.�

Ali said another means was to expose people to successful case studies using other islands like Jamaica and Belize which exported lionfish. She also gave examples of lionfish culinary competitions, a lionfish cookbook-proof that people were eating lionfish and surviving.�She said organising lionfish tasting events was another way to overcome this perception.�

Shark has been good�to the Fergusons
The Sunday Guardian returned to Maracas on Wednesday and asked vendors, fishermen and visitors for their comments after the first lionfish and bake taste-test was conducted at Richard's Bake and Shark shop, by Papa Bois Conservation director Marc de Verteuil, Institute of Marine Affairs coral reef ecologist Jahson Alemu and Ali on February 15.�The shark has been good to the Fergusons. Four out of the six shark and seafood shops at Maracas are owned by family members, creating a veritable shark-and-bake dynasty.�

Giselle Ferguson, from Richard's, said since the article was published in the Sunday Guardian's February 16 edition, four out of ten people came to the popular establishment asking if they had lionfish on the menu.�She said the other six stuck to the bake and shark staple that Richard's is famous for among tourists and locals alike. Ferguson said customers may probably want to try the lionfish, but they needed more knowledge of the species as they were afraid of the lionfish's venom.�

Gary Ferguson, the owner of Richard's and Giselle's brother, said, "A lot of people came and asked about the lionfish, but not everybody wants to try it.

'People asking for the fish'
"The feedback we got from the people was anything that is poisonous they don't want any part of it.�"They keep asking if I have and I tell them I don't. It was the environmentalists who brought just a few lionfish, and we prepared it in our kitchen for them to test."�Ferguson said people will know the difference between the shark and lionfish as they were two different textures and quality of meat.�He said perhaps lionfish could be on the menu in the future, as well as red fish or grouper and bake, but shark remained the main delicacy in T&T.

People came from all over the world to try Richard's shark and bake as it was also very healthy, hence the reason why most of the population loved shark, Ferguson said with a hearty laugh.�He said his grandmother, 95-year-old "Ma" Ferguson, the matriarch of the family, was living testament to the health benefits of eating shark and not eating meat, as she was very strong.�According to Ferguson, sharks don't develop cancer and were good to treat ailments such as arthritis and inflammation.

However, the manager of the US-based conservation group, Pew Charitable Trusts, Angelo Villagomez said sharks do not have cancer-fighting properties.

'I will lose customers�if I start to sell it'
Ferguson said sharks were very healthy to eat. His grandmother utilised most parts of the shark, using the liver to make shark oil, head, fins and bones which they all grew up on also.�Patsy Ferguson, of Patsy's Bake and Shark and Gary's aunt, said the lionfish was too dangerous to eat and was too much of a risk.�She said since the Sunday Guardian's lionfish story was printed, a lot of customers came asking if she was selling it as they wanted no part of it, believing the lionfish to be poisonous.�

Patsy said if she started to sell lionfish, she will lose customers. �She said, "When my customers come here they ask for shark or king fish, they don't want no other fish.�"People use to say we're selling catfish, that is a no-no, we sell strictly mako shark, blue shark or blacktip shark that comes from Suriname, we don't get any from Las Cuevas or Maracas.�"People used to sell catfish but not me or my family."�

Ian Ferguson, from Nathalie's Bake and Shark and Gary's brother, said people in Maracas were not accustomed or familiar with lionfish and their specialty was shark.�A bake-and-shark lover said she didn't ask what type of shark she was eating, but she enjoyed it and didn't think of any of the consequences. She said she wouldn't want to eat such a predator like the lionfish. �

Leo Kowlessar, a Trinidadian living in New York, said he didn't believe that sharks will ever get wiped out because there were so many different types of sharks all over the world, and if one species became scarce, they will find another shark species. �

Aboud:�Longline vessels decimating shark, other marine life
Speaking in a brief telephone interview from China, on Thursday, Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS) secretary Gary Aboud said the scores of Taiwanese longline fishing vessels operating in local waters were responsible not only for decimating shark species but were also depleting other marine life.�Sonny, from Canada, said lionfish can probably replace shark if it was being overfished.

Maria, from Venezuela said shark was not as popular in her homeland as here, however, it should not be overfished to the point of extinction. Terry Lee suggested creating�new and innovative dishes instead such as lionfish accra and pholourie instead of looking for a substitute for shark and bake.�Aria said she would have to taste it to make a judgment call.�John said he wouldn't eat lionfish because the venom it carried was enough of a deterrent.

Fisherman "Master Brother John" from the Maracas Fishing Depot said one of the fishermen received a puncture in his arm from a lionfish's barb in his net but the injury was not serious when he want for medical attention.�John confirmed the lionfish was in T&T waters, but they were only catching a few in their nets.�Fisherman Clement Vargas said if the lionfish was in abundance, it could be used as an alternative to shark, but so can other readily available species of fish.

Another fisherman named "Django" said those who fish had some species that they kept for themselves, such as "power," and they knew how to cook catfish and even stingray to make them taste like shark and the average consumer wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Papa Bois launches�campaign to save the shark
Papa Bois Conservation launched its campaign to raise awareness in T&T about the worldwide threats to sharks from overfishing at the current unsustainable rate on February 23.�The launch took place at the Maracas turn-off, leading to the bake-and-shark haven in Maracas Bay.�The report was carried in the international media, such as the London Metro, Washington Post and Associated Press.�

De Verteuil said he was preparing to meet with the shark-and-bake vendors to do a presentation on shark conservation, the consequences of depleting shark populations, and the lionfish as a possible alternative to shark and bake.

Source

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Invasive lionfish imperiling ecosystem

The South Pacific native with no known predator is eating its way through the Gulf and Caribbean.

It sounds like something from a horror film: A beautiful, feathery-looking species of fish with venomous spines and a voracious appetite sweeps into the Gulf of Mexico, gobbling up everything in its path.

Unfortunately for the native fish and invertebrates it's eating, this invasion isn't unfolding on the big screen.

In recent months, news has been spreading of lionfish, a maroon-and-white striped native of the South Pacific that first showed up off the coast of southern Florida in 1985. Most likely, someone dumped a few out of a home fish tank. With a reproduction rate that would put rabbits to shame and no predators to slow its march, the fish swept up the Eastern seaboard and down to the Bahamas and beyond, where it is now more common than in its home waters.

"The invasive lionfish have been nearly a perfect predator," says Martha Klitzkie, director of operations at the nonprofit Reef Environmental Education Foundation, or REEF, headquartered in Key Largo, Fla. "Because they are such an effective predator, they're moving into new areas and, when they get settled, the population increases pretty quickly."

The lionfish population exploded in the Florida Keys and the Bahamas between 2004 and 2010. As lionfish populations boomed, the number of native prey fish dropped. According to a 2012 study by Oregon State University, native prey fish populations along nine reefs in the Bahamas fell an average of 65 percent in just two years.

Lionfish first appeared in the western Gulf of Mexico in 2010; scientists spotted them in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, a protected area about 100 miles off the Texas coast, in 2011. Now scuba divers spot them on coral heads nearly every time they explore a reef. So far, significant declines in native fish populations haven't occurred here, but the future is uncertain.

'IMPOSSIBLE BATTLE'

"It's kind of this impossible battle," says Michelle Johnston, a research specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Galveston, who manages a coral reef monitoring project at the Flower Garden Banks. "When you think how many are out there, I don't think eradication is possible now."

Two nearly identical species are found in the Gulf. They grow to about 18 inches and have numerous venomous spines. Their stripes are unique, like those of a zebra. They hover in the water, hanging near coral heads or underwater structures where reef fish flourish. Ambush predators, they wait for prey fish to draw near, then gulp them down in a flash.

The fish mature in a year and can spawn every four days, pumping out 2 million eggs a year. They live about 15 years.

In the South Pacific, predators and parasites keep lionfish in check. But here, nothing recognizes them as food - those feathery spines serve as do-not-touch warnings to other fish. The few groupers that have been spotted taste-testing lionfish have spit them back out, Johnston says.

In the basement of the NOAA Fisheries Science Center on the grounds of the old Fort Crockett in Galveston, Johnston sorts through a rack of glass vials. Each one contains the contents found in the stomach of a lionfish collected in the Flower Garden Banks.

She points to a fish called a bluehead wrasse in one jar. "This little guy should still be on the reef eating algae, not here in a tube," she says. Other jars contain brown chromis, red night shrimp, cocoa damselfish and mantis shrimp, all native species found in lionfish bellies. "The amount of fish we find in their guts - it's really alarming. They're eating juvenile fish that should be growing up. They're also eating fish that the native species are supposed to be eating."

Lionfish can eat anything that fits into their mouth, even fish half their own size. They eat commercially important species, such as snapper and grouper, and the fish that those species eat, too. They're eating so much, in fact, that scientists say some are suffering from a typically human problem - obesity. "We're finding them with copious amount of fat - white, blubbery fat," Johnston says.

They can adapt to almost any habitat, living anywhere from a mangrove in 1 foot of water to a reef 1,000 feet deep. They like crevices and holes but can find that on anything from a coral head to a drilling platform to a sunken ship. They can handle a wide range of salinity levels, too. Their range seems limited only by temperature - so far they don't seem to overwinter farther north than Cape Hatteras, North Carolina - and their southern expansion extends to the northern tip of South America, although they are expected to reach the middle of Argentina in another year or two.

'A SNOWBALL EFFECT'

"As long as they have something to eat, they'll be there," Johnston says.

The impact of their invasion could become widespread, scientists warn.

In the Gulf, lionfish are eating herbivores like damselfish and wrasse - "the lawnmowers of the reef," Johnston calls them - that keep the reef clean.

"When you take the reef fish away, there's not a lot of other things left to eat algae," she says.

That creates a phase shift from a coral-dominated habitat to an algae-dominated one. "When you take fish away, coral gets smothered, the reef dies, and we lose larger fish. It's a snowball effect of negativity."

The only known way to keep lionfish populations in check, scientists say, is human removal.

That's why lionfish "derbies," or fishing tournaments of sorts, are popping up around the Caribbean and Gulf.

Locals are encouraged to kill and gather the fish, and in some places, including Belize, cook them up afterward.

The key is getting people to understand that lionfish are safe to eat - and tasty.

SOURCE

How bad is the lionfish invasion? We're now trying to train sharks to eat them

Back in 1985, a lone lionfish was first spotted off the Florida coast, possibly dumped into the ocean by a dissatisfied aquarium owner. At the time, it seemed harmless enough: a bright, colorful fish native to Indonesia that had somehow made its way over here.

No one could have imagined the disaster that would follow.

Thirty years later, the venomous lionfish has conquered the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico wreaking havoc on ecosystems up and down the coast. Unlike in its native Pacific habitats, there are few natural predators here to keep this invasive species in check. So the lionfish has expanded voraciously, gobbling up other reef fish and mollusks and attacking commercially important species like grouper and snapper.

By 2014, lionfish were everywhere, from North Carolina and even Rhode Island down to the coasts of Panama and Venezuela:

Lionfish sightings, 1985-2014

Lionfish sightings, 1985-2014. (US Geological Survey/Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission)

Now humans are trying every desperate measure they can think of to slow the lionfish invasion - from�hunting them to putting them�on restaurant menus to training local sharks�to eat them up. Here's a look at the war on lionfish:

Why lionfish are devouring the Atlantic

The lionfish invasion likely began with just a handful of fish, spreading slowly during the 1980s and 1990s, and then exploding after 2005.

Because the lionfish have venomous spines, they have few natural predators - particularly in the Atlantic and Caribbean. And lionfish can survive in all sorts of marine environments, deep or shallow, salty or less salty. They also spawn like crazy, with a female releasing some 2 million eggs per year.

And here's the bad news: Lionfish are extremely adept at scarfing up everything in sight - particularly in and around vital coral reefs. Other predators might snack on a few reef fish when there are plenty to go around and then move along when the population thins out. Not lionfish. As researchers from Oregon State University�recently discovered, lionfish will stay in one area and keep devouring smaller fish and mollusks - often until the local population goes extinct.

Scientists continue to be amazed at how destructive lionfish can be. One�experiment in the Bahamas found that lionfish can gobble up 79 percent of juvenile fish in a reef in just five weeks. What's more, they often kill off key species like the parrotfish, which clean algae off corals. As a result, one�recent study found that a lionfish invasion can lead to a 10 percent decline in Caribbean reefs, which soon get overrun by slimy algae.

The problem is only likely to get worse. Another�recent NOAA study found that lionfish prefer warmer waters and were likely to keep carving out fresh territory as global warming heats up the oceans.

The 5 best ideas we have for stopping lionfish (so far)

Now people are frantically searching for ways to stop the lionfish's spread.

We enter this fight with a few advantages - humans, after all, are the planet's apex predator, having wiped out half of all wildlife since the 1970s. But the lionfish has been surprisingly difficult to kill. Here are our five best ideas so far:

1) Hunt them! Back in 2013, Florida held a contest in which divers competed to spear and kill the most lionfish, with $3,500 worth of prizes at stake. As Hannah Hoag�described in Nature, hunting competitions are actually a decent idea - and becoming much more frequent. Scientists have found that frequent efforts by divers to cull even just a fraction of lionfish can allow local fish populations to rebound.

One problem? Hunting invasive species down can be difficult.�Florida tried this with the Burmese pythons that were overrunning its swamps, and the pythons are still there. What's more, culls can sometimes backfire - if they only take out the weaker fish and allow the stronger ones to thrive. So, Hoag reports, marine biologists are trying to make these lionfish "derbies" a bit more scientific and focused on efforts that will do the most damage.

2) Eat them! Our appetite for sushi�has nearly eradicated global bluefin tuna populations. So why don't we start eating lionfish instead? As The New York Times recently reported, many Florida restaurants are starting to serve up lionfish, whose flaky white meat is pretty good when cooked. (Here's�a good-looking recipe for lionfish sliders.) The hitch? It's still labor-intensive to hunt these fish. We can't just scoop them up with fishing nets - divers have to get out there and spear them.

3) Train sharks to eat them! In theory, Caribbean reef sharks could eat up lionfish - after all, the sharks aren't affected by the venomous tentacles. But most local sharks aren't used to this garish newcomer and typically stay clear.

So, in places like�Cuba and�Honduras, divers have recently been spearing lionfish and physically handing them over to sharks - in the hopes that sharks will acquire a predilection for lionfish flesh. You can see some pictures of this practice from Mathieu Foulique here.

The downsides? This is quite dangerous for the divers, and only those experienced in shark behaviors should give this a try. More importantly, it's not clear how effective this actually is - some experts�worry that it just teaches sharks to go after�people. Here's�a video of divers in Belize trying to teach reef sharks to kill:

(Claudette Miller/Youtube)

4) Stop importing them! This one's a little less exciting, but obvious. Lionfish are a mainstay in many aquariums, thanks to their vivid colors and garish tentacles. But if lots of people own lionfish, that increases the odds that some will escape into the wild. So, recently, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission�voted to ban both the importation of live lionfish into the state.

5) When in doubt, make an iPhone app! Florida regulators are trying lots of things to encourage lionfish hunting (you no longer need a license to hunt the fish down). But they're also asking the public for help. In September, the state released a�"Report Lionfish" app, in which people can send in sightings. The first 250 to do so get a "Lionfish Control Team" t-shirt.

Still, it remains to be seen whether any of these ideas will work. Some experts remain skeptical. "Unfortunately,"�says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "invasive lionfish populations will continue to grow and cannot be eliminated using conventional methods. Marine invaders are nearly impossible to eradicate once established." At best, we can only try to keep them under control.

Further reading

Paul Greenberg�wrote a great piece for Food & Wine magazine�about hunting and eating lionfish back in 2011.

Study: Caribbean coral reefs�could disappear "within a few decades"

Here's a video of what it's like to hunt lionfish.

Source

Divers try spoon feeding lionfish to sharks, a method that could come back to bite them

In the war against invasive lionfish, Andr�s Jim�nez has taken up one of the oldest weapons used by humans: the spear.

Jim�nez thinks this is a novel approach to help rid the Caribbean Ocean of a growing menace. He skewers the colorful fish into a kabob, swims to coral in a marine sanctuary off the coast of Cuba and holds it bleeding and squirming under the jaws of reef sharks.

The idea is to get sharks to develop a taste for a fish they are not accustomed to eating. That's right, Jim�nez, who co-manages a dive operation in the Gardens of the Queen National Marine Park, is trying to teach one of the Caribbean's biggest predators to eat a new type of fish.

The lionfish is an exotic glutton that eats everything it can stuff in its mouth, and the fish are destroying life on the coral reef. Native to the Pacific Ocean, the fish were widely traded for their looks and were first spotted near Miami in the mid-1980s before proliferating in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic and the Caribbean near the turn of the century.

They have been called the Norway rats of the Atlantic and Caribbean because they are voracious eaters that wolf down scores of reef animals from Florida to Mexico and Venezuela but have no predator in those waters.

Spoon-feeding sharks, as Jim�nez has done in recent weeks, is the latest desperate attempt to restore the balance of an ecosystem that humans threw out of whack.

Reef sharks are thought to be one of a few animals that can choke down a lionfish. To avoid the toxic spikes on its back and tail fin, said Antonio Busiello, they eat the fish starting at its mouth.

Busiello, a photography documentarian in Florence, said he watched that happen while diving in Honduras with park officials who speared lionfish and fed them to reef sharks in 2010. His Web site is full of pictures depicting the action.

But marine ecologist Serena Hackerott and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said feeding lionfish to sharks is crazy. Sharks "are going to associate divers with food," she said.

In a test of 71 ocean sites - in Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Cuba and the Bahamas - UNC researchers found nothing to show that lionfish are shark bait, according to a paper published last year in the journal PLOS One.

"I've been a diver for more than 10 years and have never felt threatened by a shark," Hackerott wrote in a recent blog post. "I might not feel so comfortable, though, if sharks began to expect snacks every time I enter the water."

It's a justifiable fear that often plays out at the sanctuary, Jim�nez said. In an e-mail from Cuba, he wrote that "sharks don't seem to be hunting for lionfish naturally, but they are really mad for dead or injured lionfish, and they get used to being fed lionfish by divers. They learn fast and improve ways to get that lionfish once the diver captures it."

When Jim�nez dives with groups of divers and photographers, the sightseeing can become tense and dangerous.

For example, he wrote, "An injured lionfish escapes the sharks and then the sharks get really mad. They start looking for the prey everywhere, and in this quest they . . . sometimes hit divers with the nose, or can even try to bite the spear, the rocks where the lionfish is hiding, or the cameras. Then the situation sometimes gets out of control."

Busiello can testify to this behavior. When he traveled to Roatan Marine Park in Honduras four years ago to see thousands of grouper in a mating ritual and "missed the moment," he wound up diving to watch lionfish get fed to the park's 22 gray reef sharks.

The sharks came close - 15 inches from his camera. "I got bumped a couple of times. They hit me on the side," Busiello said. "A big shark, a six- to seven-foot shark hits you, you feel it."

Somehow the recommended approach to reducing the lionfish population has been twisted around, Hackerott said: They should be overfished for human consumption, not reef sharks. The pretty fish is poisonous, but when a chef rips out its spine and cooks it, lionfish are delicious.

There's no witness to an instance of someone releasing lionfish into the waters in Florida, but that's the largely accepted working theory for how they ended up there.

This sort of thing keeps happening in the United States, the second-largest market for the legal trade of wildlife. Florida in particular is overrun with Burmese pythons, tegu lizards from South America and Cuban tree frogs, to name just a few invasive animals.

The Chesapeake Bay region is fighting the aggressive Asian northern snakehead fish that eats native fish, and efforts to harvest it from rivers have done little to stop it. Asian carp that spread from Arkansas to the Great Lakes region and Louisiana have outmuscled native fish for food, leaving many to starve.

The voracious appetite of the lionfish is why divers and marine biologists want to eliminate them, but feeding them to sharks is a scary task, Jim�nez said. "I am [spearing them] very seldom, as it gets dangerous," he said. "You can't do it in all spots, only in places with small shark populations."

Teaching sharks to eat lionfish "is a double-edged sword," said Ian Drysdale, the Honduras coordinator for the Healthy Reefs Initiative. "You don't want to relate human divers with shark feed. It can get out of hand."

Washington Post

This is true the Sharks here on Ambergris Caye are now associating divers with being fed, but this journalist is trying to incite and sensationalize by saying the association is divers and food. The association is with getting fed, divers are not the food or in jeopardy from the shark.
There have been no cases of the divers getting eaten and won't be. Our ideas of serving up Lionfish to sharks and supplying restaurants with their delicious meat is working. Its easy to see the difference in the population of our local reef, we're winning...and having fun with the battle. Divers are the only hope of controlling the Lionfish population and they enjoy doing it. Shark phobics are laughed at as uninformed and inexperienced people. Sharks and divers are friends.

OPEN YOUR EYES TOPIC: THE IMPORTANCE OF LIONFISHING IN BELIZE

In Belize, Critically endangered wrasse now favorite food of invasive lionfish

Scientists examining the stomach contents of invasive lionfish caught on the inner barrier reef of Belize have discovered that nearly half of the diet of these aggressive fish consists of a critically endangered fish known as the social wrasse (Halichoeres socialis).

The social wrasse is one of five coral reef fishes listed at the highest risk of extinction on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Found only on clear-water reefs around inshore mangrove islands in Belize, "its combination of traits-small size, schooling, and low, hovering behavior-make it an easy target for the lionfish," says Smithsonian scientist Carole Baldwin of the Division of Fishes at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

"The social wrasse is already under heavy stress from habitat destruction by development. Added pressure from lionfish predation may spell extinction for the social wrasse,” Baldwin and co-authors write in a recent article in the Journal of the International Society for Reef Studies. Other Caribbean fish species with traits similar to the social wrasse and limited ranges may face the same fate.

A Pacific fish popular in the aquarium trade, lionfish (Pterois volitans and P. miles) were introduced to the Atlantic in the mid-1990s. Today they are found along the U.S. Atlantic coast from Rhode Island to Florida, in the Bahamas and Gulf of Mexico and throughout the Caribbean. "Invasive lionfish are two to three times more effective at removing small native fishes than are native predators," the scientists write. Lionfish are the latest in a long list of threats to Caribbean coral reefs, other threats include climate change, habitat destruction and pollution.

During their study the scientists speared 68 lionfish within the habitat range of the social wrasse and removed their stomachs. Of the 44 stomachs found to contain recently eaten fish, the scientists identified the consumed prey by morphology and through DNA analysis. Social wrasses represented 46 percent of the fishes found in lionfish stomachs, making them the primary prey item of the lionfish. One lionfish had 18 social wrasses in its stomach.

While the social wrasse lives only in shallow water, the lionfish is able to exploit deeper depths. For example, Baldwin is currently studying fish living in deep tropical reefs (as deep as 660 feet) off the coast of Curacao, and has encountered large numbers of lionfish eating native species there. "My worry is that they are decimating species of native fish that have yet to even be discovered," she says.

While the lionfish invasion of the Caribbean cannot be stopped, "targeted removals have reduced lionfish numbers in many areas," the scientists write, mainly by divers seeking them for food. "Lionfish is delicious-cooked or as sushi/sashimi/ceviche-which lends hope to efforts that we will be able to control their numbers," Baldwin explains.

Some fisherman want nothing to do with lionfish because of the potential of being stung by their neurotoxin-containing fin spines, which at a minimum cause hours of excruciating pain, Baldwin says. In rare cases a lionfish sting can cause paralysis and even death.

While conducting their study, Baldwin and co-author Luiz Rocha of the California Academy of Sciences, were stung "because we put speared lionfish into mesh bags while scuba diving, and venomous spines poking from the bag got us," Baldwin explains. "Divers are now using lionfish containment devices, which are containers made with PVC pipe. Once you get the lionfish into the container, no worries."

"On the whole, the social wrasse is just one brick in the wall we call biodiversity," Baldwin says. The coral reef ecosystem "won't crumble by removing one brick, but at some point if enough�bricks are removed, it will."

SmithsonianScience.org

Feeding Lionfish to a Nurse Shark in Belize