Are Lionfish as harmful to the marine environment as we’ve been told?

Lionfish are voracious predators, both outcompeting native coral reef fishes for prey and also directly eating juvenile native reef fishes. They’re actually eating so many native fish that scientists studying invasive lionfish found an unusual tissue in them—it turns out that many Caribbean lionfish are obese.

According to the nonprofit Reef Environmental Education Foundation, lionfish can eat more than 70 species of native fish and invertebrates, including individuals up to half the size of the lionfish, and can eat 460,000 fish per acre per year—which has reduced native fish populations on some reefs by up to 90 percent.

Because they have no predators in their native range (yes, some groupers and sharks sometimes eat them, but not nearly enough to control their populations), they are found in super high abundance in the Caribbean—sometimes up to 200 fish per acre! In some ecosystems, about half of the total predator biomass is now lionfish, remarkable for a species that just wasn’t there 30 years ago. Oh, and they reach reproductive maturity in under a year, and one female can spawn over 2 million eggs in a single year.

So, Lionfish are indeed an ecological problem.

What can we do about them? One of the most popular strategies is hunting lionfish. The goal of hunting Lionfish is clear– successfully remove a significant number of adult lionfish off the reefs during any given dive.

Hence… WHY the SSI Ocean Guardian Specialty was created. As diving professionals, it is our mission to educate and protect our marine environment.