While a No Touch policy is the best way to enjoy diving on a coral reef (safest for reef life and for you), sometimes more emphatic action is needed.Case in point, the recent sightings of Lionfish along the Belize section of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.
Witness the mug shot in the above poster for the invasive Lionfish (Pterois volitans/miles) in signage being distributed to dive shops throughout Belize. Efforts to catch and destroy the Lionfish are being encouraged and conservation organizations such as The Nature Conservancy have mounted an educational campaign to alert residents about the perils of invasive species. If allowed to become widespread, Lionfish in the Caribbean can cause significant and costly declines in native fish and lobster populations.
Impacts can mean less fishery products and reduction in overall reef health and diversity. Divers are being advised to capture any Lionfish they see by using a net or coaxing it into a bag. As incentives, cash rewards are being offered for specimens collected. If capture is not possible, reporting the sighting and its location to dive shops is the next best thing!
I know this all sounds grisly and apparently counter to biodiversity conservation objectives. After all, it's now the conservation NGOs encouraging divers to hunt and kill a beautiful species. But if left unchecked, Lionfish in the Caribbean have the potential to shift the ecological stability of reef systems and can quickly spell the demise of important local food fish and invertebrates.
2 comments:
Where have lionfish been coming from? We deal with exotic invaders constantly in the great lakes and they have decimated the food chain and totally disrupted things.
from what little data we have, the most likely agent for lionfish introduction in the caribbean appears to be aquarium specimen release... clearly, there would have needed to have been more than a single specimen released for successful propagation of the species, but you have to begin to wonder how many formerly captive specimens were set free...
environmental damage aside for the moment, this situation also presents a somewhat interesting study in population genetics... i would expect, given a small reproducing population, that some genetic bottlenecking has occurred in the now wild population... i wonder what unique characters are being expressed in the caribbean populations that might be distinct from indo-pacific stock...
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