“All we can do is eat them.”That’s what a fisherman in Negril, Jamaica, told me a few weeks ago, before filleting a foot-long lionfish. He sharpened his knife before removing the fish’s eighteen venomous spines and tossing them onto the white sand. When he was done, he added the lionfish filets to those of other fish the bow of his kayak, all of which he sold to one of the resorts on Seven Mile Beach.
A few years ago, people in Jamaica considered lionfish more trouble than they were worth. Even when fisherman braved the fish’s venomous spines, there was no market for meat. They focussed instead on profitable species like conch, mahimahi, parrotfish, tarpon, tuna, and wahoo, while lionfish ravaged reefs and displaced native species. But a four-year campaign by Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency (N.E.P.A.) has reduced the lionfish population significantly; in April, the N.E.P.A. announced a sixty-six per-cent drop in lionfish sightings.
The lionfish, which is Native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, is believed to have come to the Atlantic in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew destroyed a Florida aquarium, releasing six or eight of the invaders into the local ecosystem. (That story has been disputed by reports of lionfish sightings from as long ago as 1985.) Since the nineties, the species has settled throughout the Caribbean, and lionfish have been found as far north as Maine.
Lionfish thrive in the shallows near the shoreline, but they can also survive at depths of more than a thousand feet. They spawn multiple times a season, which means that a single fish can produce as many as two million eggs a year. They also wreck havoc up and down the food chain, eating small crustaceans and fish, crowding out other predators and encouraging algal growth.
Efforts to eradicate the species in the United States haven’t been as successful as those in Jamaica, but Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (F.W.C.) is hoping to change that with a new app that tracks the fish. It’s not the first of its kind: the F.W.C. released a similar app earlier this year for tracking the gopher tortoise, a threatened species, and Ohio State University has an app for reporting sightings of invaders in Great Lakes, like Asian carps and long-horned beetles.
Since 1992, the U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S) has measured and mapped lionfish, but those reports had to be filed through the U.S.G.S.’s Web site. “We wanted something more convenient that you could use right out on the boat, wherever you have phone service,”Amanda Nalley, a public information specialist with the F.W.C., told me.
The app opens to a home screen with three options: report a sighting, learn more about the species, or review safe-handling instructions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet geotag reports, but users enter their name and e-mail address before indicating the number of lionfish encountered, as well as the location, water depth and temperature, and any harvesting gear used to recover the fish.
The F.W.C. hopes that this new technology, in combination with educational outreach, will help to control the lionfish population. In the app’s first two weeks, a hundred and fifty users submitted sightings, though, Nalley said, “half of what we’re doing is data collection, but we’re also making direct contact with people who’ve seen lionfish. It’s about outreach and education.”
That’s part of what reduced the population in Jamaica: the N.E.P.A. worked to teach fisherman how to harvest lionfish, which can be dangerous. For years, rumors circulated that the fish’s spines were poisonous, misinformation that was likely not discouraged by a potion recipe in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” that calls for of lionfish spines.
But the sting of a lionfish isn’t deadly, and the meat is free of the stinging toxins—it’s also tasty, a fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.) launched 2010 campaign to advertise. James Morris, an ecologist with N.O.A.A., said that the campaign was “a no-brainer.” “Lionfish are really great eating,” Morris told me. “Good on the grill, good as ceviche, and great fried.”
Creating a consumer market for invasive species is one of the most successful ways of combatting them. Like cupcakes or artisanal pickles, it can take a lot of marketing and hype to create a demand that matches the supply. The Connecticut chef Bun Lai’s invasive-species menu, which Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in 2012, includes lionfish sashimi; Eat the Invaders, the Web site of the conservation biologist Joe Roman, has recipes for everything from slow-cooked nutria to spaghetti with periwinkles.
But, even when there’s a taste for these non-native plants and animals, very few of them can be commercially harvested. Individuals often have to hunt or gather these critters on their own, which is especially difficult to do with lionfish, since there are no effective traps or bait. The only successful methods for catching them, so far, are spears and handheld nets, both of which can be expensive and time-consuming.
Florida has tried to encourage hand-fishing as much as it can. In 2012, it waived fishing-permit requirements for divers who go after lionfish, and it removed the bag limit on the species. The F.W.C. also hopes to waive some of the safety restrictions on spearing in state parks and on hunting near the shoreline, so that snorkelers and scuba divers can hunt the fish wherever they are. The F.W.C. is also lobbying for a financial incentive for lionfish removal in the state. The state legislature already allocated almost half a million dollars, and the funding is awaiting approval from Governor Rick Scott.
Bounties on the species have worked elsewhere, and derbies and tournaments have removed thousands of fish in only a few hours. Last year, the University of Southern Mississippi offered a five-dollar reward for every lionfish caught in the Gulf of Mexico west of Mobile Bay, and derbies sponsored by the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (R.E.E.F.) have removed more than twelve thousand lionfish since 2009. R.E.E.F. held a derby on Saturday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and will hold another next month, in Palm Beach.
But, while Florida has a few annual derbies, Jamaica has created a steady lionfish market. The campaign, funded in part by the Global Environment Facility and the United Nations Environment Programme, created a demand from restaurants that made sustained fishing profitable for fishermen. Jamaica’s six-per-cent drop in lionfish sightings is primarily because of a fierce, focussed campaign of the kind that Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is aiming for, beginning with the creation of the app and relaxing lionfish-harvesting regulations.
“The challenge with lionfish is that they’re spreading so fast that it’s hard to keep up with them,” Morris told me. A few one-off derbies won’t slow the invasion, the exact size of which Morris told me is impossible to estimate: “There are millions, maybe billions of them, who knows exactly, but we do know for certain that it’s climbing: the density of lionfish is growing.”
