The Beautiful Predator Destroying Coral Reefs | LIONFISH AN INVASIVE SPECIES | Documentary Short

They eat pretty much... So these are the egg sacs, and a female will put out two of these. Depending on water temperature, the warmer the water, it could be up to two days, every two days. These sacs will come to the surface, and they'll float for about 30 days. And then they'll open up, and the little guys will start floating with the current for roughly another 30 days before they're strong enough to swim down to a reef or a structure. Lionfish were first seen off of southeast Florida in the mid-1980s, and we suspect that they got there as a result of the aquarium tree. So we know that they're from the Indo-Pacific, the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean. People loved them in their aquariums, so people got sick of them in their aquariums as opposed to just flushing them down the toilet. They just released up into the wild behind their house first. With lionfish spawn, they released eggs up into the water column, and those eggs were transported by the currents. Off of southeast Florida, those currents generally go north. So they spread up the eastern seaboard, up into the Carolinas, and then eventually made it over into the Bahamas. And those currents are going everywhere, which brought them down into the Caribbean, parts of South America, and eventually up into the Gulf of Mexico. They showed up here in about 2010. We now have densities here that are higher than anywhere else in their invaded range. Lionfish were first sighted in the Mediterranean in 2011 in Lebanon. They've increased really fast along the area, and they've spread now to Italy. They can spawn upwards of 2 million eggs per year, which is a—that's just for an average-sized female. They spawn less eggs in larger females, but spawn upwards of 10 billion eggs. Compare that to a grouper or a snapper. They're spawning about the same or more. But what differentiates lionfish from those native species is possibly the survival rate of those eggs. So let's just say 1% of grouper eggs survive to adulthood. Lionfish may have a survival rate of 10%. Lionfish also start reproducing in their first year of life. Opposed to your native species like grouper and snapper, that may take many, many years for them to be able to start generating. Lionfish don't have any native predators, meaning nothing's really eating them. And that could be for a number of reasons. Number one, they've got spines. And not only do they have spines, the spines are infected. So anything that may be eating them is going to have a pretty painful stick in their mouth. What is that? Their stomachs can expand, I believe, 20 times the natural size. I'm going to say it's a small snapper. There was a lionfish in a derby that was brought in that had 67 little fish and one shrimp. And they have a tendency to eat only native fish because there's something called prey naivety, where the prey aren't scared of them yet because they don't have the background. And it hasn't been passed down to them yet. This is a brand new fish in the system. If a snapper or grouper enjoys eating its grunt or a pinfish, it may not have any desire to go and eat a lionfish. They also prey on the fish that keep our beefs clean. There's a lot of fish out there like parafish, for example, that eat the algae off the coral reefs, off the artificial reefs. And if there's a species like lionfish preying on those fish and removing those fish, those reefs can get overgrown with algae and die. The genetics they have are genetics from fish that survived being caught in the Indo-Pacific, survived being flown over here to the United States, survived being in a pet shop, then sold to Percival Brand, then they were released and survived to find a mate and reproduce. Our biodiversity and the fisheries are declining really fast in this part of the world. There's about a 20% decrease every year. They aren't supposed to be here, they're certainly causing impacts. And they aren't going, so what can we do? If we can actually keep lionfish under control on a local level, so on our local reefs, by going out there and harvesting. So once you harvest them, you can bring them back, you can put them on your dinner table, or you could sell them to one of the restaurants here locally or wherever you're from. This is a dish that I learned from my brother-in-law, lionfish avocado tartare. I think it's Italian. We diced up some lionfish fillets into roughly half-by-half cubes, and the lime is going to cook the lionfish about 20 to 30 minutes. Take it out of the fridge and serve it. The great thing is that it's very high in omega oils, very low in mercury, so it's actually a very healthy fish to eat. Now we just mix this all up. I'm making sushi from some beautiful lionfish caught here in Destin. It has a very clean and mild taste. I like to keep it simple and let the fish stand out. You get people asking for that. Get them on the menu. That, honestly, is going to be the way that we sustainably control this species. The State of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has recently started a program that rewards folks for going out and harvesting lionfish. So if a recreational diver goes out and harvests 17 lionfish in a day, they get paid for the first 10 fish, so they can make $50 for shooting 10 lionfish. If they shoot more, that's great. Commercial divers, the guys that are going out to make thousands and thousands of lionfish, they get rewarded by having additional monies tacked on to what they'd be making from the fish annals, to where it makes it a heck of a lot more attractive for them to go after lionfish than to go after some other species. The number of spear fishermen, and I say that with quotations, has increased dramatically. We have a really awesome ecotourism product here in Destin-Fort Law Beach now, where people come from all over to go out and harvest lionfish, not only to up the environment, but to bring some fish home, bring it to the restaurant. There's dive charters all around the northern Gulf of Mexico. While they don't really fear anything, they don't really have any predators, they will flare up and really make those spines, and try to make them look really big. To a predator, that may symbolize, oh man, that thing is way too big for me to eat, I'm just going to go find something that's a little more my size, or a little more manageable. But to a diver, it's just an easier shot. They flare up, they just sit right there, and there might be five other right next to it. Those don't move, they wait their turn. The large lionfish tournament that we have here, the Emerald Coast Open, is funded by sponsors from all over the United States. We raise about $75,000 to $100,000 in cash and gear prizes to provide to the divers. 41, 275. The winners for the most are coming in with thousands of lionfish. A lot of those are coming from here in Destin, but there's people that are participating in other locations and bringing their fish here to Destin. So I dive pretty much every weekend here in our local waters of Fort Lauderdale. I have my own little boat, but I also use charters. And I find that when you dive the same portions of the reef over and over again, you're seeing less and less of them. It's a fun sport, too. It gives you a mission to do as you're diving. It's almost like Easter egg hunting underwater. Even though we got a lot, it's not the same amount as the numbers where I live. There's not as much divers where I live, so the lionfish numbers are a lot higher. You could want to go do something good, but in my area, I'm traveling 40 miles offshore. That costs money. That's $300, $400 in gas getting there, getting back. Most of this work is currently done by recreational divers. If we can get more commercial guys interested in doing this, we can get a lot more lionfish in deeper waters. Lionfish are being removed throughout the entire calendar year, especially in the summertime when that water's warm. There's a lot of people bringing their boats here. There's a lot of people here locally that have fish. That's right on the marker right there. Those fish are on something right there. I'm kind of hoping it's sitting on a whole lot of something. The main way we're going to be able to control them is commercializing. Go get them. I may be only coming in with, let's say, 500 pounds of lionfish, which sounds like a lot, but when you compare that to the commercial longline that's coming in with 10,000 pounds of fish, it's really just a drop in the bucket. Not to mention divers are a very small community compared to the fishing industry. Fish traps are something that have been explored for about five years now. There's a gentleman named Dr. Steve Giddings that developed a trap that seems to have quite a bit of promise. It lays flat on the bottom. There's a little piece of plastic or a lattice in the middle that native fish will come to and check out, but they aren't going to hang there because there's nothing for them to eat. Lionfish, on the other hand, really like structure, so they come right up to this piece of lattice, and they'll hang out within the trap, wait for that trap to be hauled back. Fortunately, if there are any native species that are within the trap, they actually get scared by things and will swim out. Lionfish, because there's really no predators or nothing that's really eating them, they have no reason to leave, so they actually get a little bit closer to the reef. The trap closes around them. They get brought up, dumped in the boat, and the trap is re-deformed. It's difficult for folks to be able to reliably go to a restaurant to get lionfish, but the best thing to do is to continue to ask for it, because they keep asking for it. Their restaurants are going to want to supply that demand and may be willing to pay a little bit more for divers to go out and harvest lionfish, which may potentially result in an increase in the amount of lionfish they'll get. We just wrote an amazing policy paper to advise the governments in the eastern Mediterranean to allow us to hunt with scuba gear because in the Caribbean and America, the best control has been through divers, and it's created a really amazing community and it's created a great form of tourism, and it's going to be great once we're allowed.