Lionfish

There are now 659 less Indo-Pacific red lionfish calling the tranquil waters of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary home.

The end to a bunch of lionfish derbies was held this past Saturday off the lower keys. As you know, these lionfish have been making quite a nuisance of themselves for the past little while, and efforts have been made to get rid of the little rascals, whether it be simple catching, netting in, and even pan frying.

Diving teams managed to round up 109 of these dastardly invaders, adding to the tally of lionfish brought in froIndo-Pacific red lionfish m the previous derbies in Key Largo and Marathon.

Lionfish which are muscling their way into the waters off the southeast United States, Bahamas and Caribbean are causing harm to the native species to those waters as they are chowing down on vital reef species, such as snapper and grouper.

A spokesperson for the Reef Education Foundation, Lad Atkins, has commented that lionfish don’t have any natural enemies, except for us humans.

Bermuda‘s first Lionfish Tournament resulted in just four participants returning with lionfish for the weigh-in. Although this might sound disheartening, it is actually happy news for Lionfish project leader Chris Flook of the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo since it indicates a relative scarcity of lionfish in Bermuda waters.

Lionfish is an invasive species in the Caribbean where it lacks naturally predators and multiplies uncontrollably. In the Bahamas, female lionfish spawn twice a month. Lionfish Tournaments like the one just held in the Bermudas is a way to boost public awareness and decimate the number of lionfish in the Caribbean. A Lionfish Tournament held in the Bahamas a few weeks ago resulted in the catch of about 1,400 lionfish.

“If we’d caught 1,000 fish it would have been very concerning, because it means it’s happening here like everywhere else,” Flook explained. “It means we may be ahead of the game and are potentially managing the population here in Bermuda.”

However, Flook also said that one of the reasons why not many fish were caught Bermuda’s Lionfish Tournament could be that they were hiding in deep waters following the storm surge of the recent Hurricane Bill and Tropical Storm Danny.

Mr. Flook began the Lionfish Culling Programme last year to encourage divers and fishermen to hunt down the species. Organised by environmental group Groundswell, the ‘Eat ‘um to beat ‘um’ event also aimed to show how invasive lionfish can be utilized as a food source.

“I think everybody who tasted it was very for it. It’s a great tasting fish,” said Flook, as Chris Malpas, executive chef at the Bank of Butterfield, cooked up samples of speared lionfish at Pier 41.

“The tournament has got the message out and so now hopefully people might start asking for lionfish in restaurants and fishermen will bring them in rather than throwing them overboard.

By eating lionfish we will take the pressure off some of our commercial fish. Every one you take is one less eating our juvenile fish,” said Flook.

If you want to know more about spearfishing lionfish in Bermudas, contact the Bermuda Aquarium at 293-2727 ext. 127, or the Marine Conservation Officer at 293-4464 extension 146 or e-mail lionfish@gov.bm. The Marine Conservation Officer should also be contacted if you see a lionfish in Bermuda waters.

A strange algae plume has turned the normally crystal clear Caribbean Sea around the Virgin Islands green down to a depth of roughly 80 feet (25 metres) and sharply decreased visibility in these popular dive waters. How and if the plume will have any long-term effect on the region’s marine life remains unknown.

Tyler Smith, assistant professor at the Center for Marine and Environmental Studies at the University of the Virgin Islands, said that when he went diving Tuesday the visibility inside the plume was no more than 10 feet (3 metres). Below 80 feet, the water was just as clear as normally.

The reason behind the extraordinary plume can be found in South America, in the Orinoco River which flows through Venezuela before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. When the Orinoco outflow is larger than normal, the vast amounts of nutrient-rich freshwater from Venezuela cause a major algae bloom in the nearby ocean. Mixed fresh- and saltwater is lighter than seawater and will therefore rise to the top of the water column.

“It’s very stable, so it just sits there,” Smith explains.

Carried by currents, the algae plume has now spread from the South American east-coast to the Caribbean Sea and can currently be seen not only off the British and U.S. Virgin Islands but in Puerto Rican waters as well. The first patch was noticed by Smith and his colleagues in the waters off St. Croix on April 9.

When the amount of photosynthesising alga increases in a region, it attracts all sorts of organisms that feed on algae and make it possible for these populations to boom as well. The algae plume around the Virgin Islands supports an entire food chain of marine life, including plankton, jellyfish, crustaceans and fish. It is not dangerous to swim or scuba dive in, but some people might dislike the high density of jellyfish.

“This is an event that occurs every year, but we haven’t seen it come this far north,” says Trika Gerard, marine ecologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In a stroke of good luck, a NOAA research vessel was scheduled to research reef fish in these waters from April 7 to April 20 – right at the peak of the unexpected plume.

To find out more about how the plume effects marine life, the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council is urging anyone who goes out fishing in the green plume to report their location, target species and success rate of each trip. According to local fishermen the fishing is always awfully bad when the water is green, but this has not been scientifically researched yet and all data is of interest.

You can reach the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council by calling (787) 766-5927. Their website is http://www.caribbeanfmc.com.

Basking sharks have surprised researchers by leaving the cold waters of the north Atlantic during fall and head down to Bahamas and the Caribbean.

“While commonly sighted in surface waters during summer and autumn months, the disappearance of basking sharks during winter has been a great source of debate ever since an article in 1954 suggested that they hibernate on the ocean floor during this time,” said Gregory Skomal of Massachusetts Marine Fisheries. “Some 50 years later, we have helped to solve the mystery while completely re-defining the known distribution of this species.”

Basking Shark

Basking sharks are notoriously difficult to study for several reasons. They feed exclusively on plankton which means you can’t catch them using traditional rod-and-reel methods and they disappear down to deep waters for extended periods of time. During the part of the year when they do stay close to the surface, they are only found in cool waters teaming with plankton where the underwater visibility is close to zilch.

This situation has led to a lot of speculation about their life style and where they actually spend the winters. Despite being the second largest fish in the world, the basking shark is remarkably elusive and mysterious.

What finally solved the puzzle was the aid of new satellite-based tagging technology and a novel geolocation system which made it possible to track the basking whales as they commenced their annual migration. Data sent out from the tags unveiled that basking sharks migrates to warm tropical waters in fall. Their migrations have been able to go undetected until know since the sharks travel at depths of 200 to 1,000 meters and sometimes remain at those depths for weeks or even months at a time.

Skomal said he and his fellow researchers were absolutely surprised when they first received a signal from the tagged sharks coming from the tropical waters of the western Atlantic, since virtually everyone assumed basking sharks to be cool-water dwellers found in temperate regions only.

This new breakthrough show just how little we still know about even the largest marine animals inhabiting the world’s oceans. The basking shark can reach a length of 10 metres and weigh up to seven metric tons, yet it has managed to spend every summer in the Caribbean without anyone noticing it.

You can find more information in the report published on May 7 in Current Biology.

Since the first specimens were spotted in the year 2000, the number of lionfish living off the coast of North Carolina is now so high that scientists fear it is too late to eliminate them. Instead, marine researchers are joining forces with sport divers and cooks to keep the fish population in check the old fashion way – with rice, spicy sauce and a slice of lemon.

The lionfish has a sweet meat that tastes similar to that of the appreciated food fishes like the snapper and the grouper. If you want to help save the native North Carolinian fauna by putting lionfish on as many dinner plates as possible, there are several things you can do.

For all you scuba divers, Discovery Diving Co. in Beaufort and Olympus Dive Center in Morehead City are recruiting sport divers for a series of “lionfish rodeos” that will take place during the summer dive season. The first event is planned to May 18 and 19, and new events will then be held regularly throughout the summer.

During the first lionfish rodeo, participating divers will be thought how to collect lionfish in a safe way using protective gloves. In addition to getting some lionfish off the reefs and provide all participants with a tasty meal, the rodeo will also give marine researchers a chance to study how rapidly lionfish repopulate an area after being vanquished.

In addition to divers and marine researchers, representatives of the Carteret Community College culinary school will be involved in the rodeo project. One of their main goals is to persuade restaurants in the area to start serving lionfish, so those of you that don’t dive can still help out by asking for lionfish when dining out.

“They taste good, and if we can create a food market for them maybe that will not only help keep them in control but maybe take the pressure off some other species,” sais Debby Boyce, owner of Discovery Dive Shop.

The lionfish is not a welcomed guest in North Carolina since it competes with native species for space and food and puts even more stress on already threatened fish like snappers and groupers. The lionfish seem to lack natural predators in western Atlantic waters because the lionfish population has increased at a pace unlike anything scientists have ever seen from an invasive fish species in this part of the world.

“In places off North Carolina the population density appears to be several times the norm in their native waters”, said NOAA researcher James Morris.

North Carolina is not the only state with an exploding lionfish problem on their hands; the species can now be found in large quantities all the way down into the Caribbean.

“They’re eating everything,” said Lisa A. Mitchell, executive director of Reef Environmental Education Foundation, a Florida non-profit group that is helping several Caribbean governments deal with invasive lionfish. “They could wipe out entire reefs.

The lionfish is not only a problem for native flora and fauna; it is also disliked among snorkelers and scuba divers since it is equipped with long spines capable of delivering a painful venomous sting. The venom itself it usually not lethal, but it can cause paralysis and excruciating pain – two things you definitely don’t want to suffer from while trying to get up from the deep.

In North Carolina ordinary swimmers and snorkelers rarely have to worry about lionfish since this tropical species prefer to stay in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, i.e. miles offshore and mostly at depths of at least 100 feet. In the warmer places like the Caribbean you can on the other hand encounter lionfish in the shallows right next to the beach.

In North Carolina it is usually the scuba divers who see this fish and they are alarmed by the situation. Divers off the North Carolina coast now routinely find up to 100 lionfish during a single wreck dive.

“If you go deeper than 100 feet, they’re ubiquitous now,” said Paula Whitfield, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Beaufort. “They’re absolutely everywhere.”

Catching lionfish is labour intensive but not very difficult; all you need is a net or a spear and some protective clothing to keep yourself from being stung. The divers organized by Discovery Diving Co. in Beaufort and Olympus Dive Center in Morehead City will be fitted with the kind of puncture-proof gloves worn by workers who handle used hypodermic needles and other medical waste. Before the lionfish is cleaned and cooked it will be held down using pliers and have its venomous spines snipped off by a wire cutter.

Lionfish is not very hard to net or spear-fish since they are virtually fearless and will hold their ground even when approached by divers. Since they have so few enemies in the wild, they probably don’t see any point in fleeing. However, if we are to really eat our way out of the lionfish problem a less labour intensive method than sending down divers armed with spears and nets must naturally be developed and NOAA researchers are therefore currently working on a trap system that uses live bait.

Hopefully, we will soon see the invasive lionfish on dinner tables all the way along the western Atlantic.

Connect to a piece of seaweed, were some fish eggs that are laid in Florida and the Caribbean catch a ride in the Gulf Stream to the coast line of Rhode Island. When they hatch they stand little to no chance to surviving as soon as the water cools down starting in th Fall. But a group of divers found them on an annual basis. For apporxmatley 25 years the New England Aquarium Dive Club has been doing this. In the Fall, about 200 divers were sent out to rescue as many juvenile fish as possible. Each year the fish that were rescued are donated to different aquariums and fish keepers.

With 70 people last year, the group caught their first lionfish. Usually the gruoup will catch 30 to 40 different fish. Butterflyfish are usually the most common kind found. This year the club was held in the conjunction. With there being warmer water, children and snorklers got involved as well. Al Bozza, the New England Aquarium Dive Club director, described this year’s rescue as a family event, and pointed to the education opportunity for children.

To read more about this get ahold of the Aquarium Fish International Janurary Issue.