one of the coolest things we saw this trip!

[t4e]

I guess we have to ask...

ooh sorry i thought it was know

they were the first to initiate a culling program where they use private and commercial divers under a special permit to remove the lionfish

in addition after they studied them enough to ensure its OK lionfish have made it on the menus at restaurants, seriously lol

http://www.reef.org/catalog/cookbook

 

[WB2GLP]

If it's the same Nestor I'm thinking of, he should know better. A diver who frequents this board was bitten on the thumb by an eel while her DM was feeding it a lionfish. You can read the post here.

Eel Attack in Cozumel (The Feeding of Lionfish)

 

[khblair]

sounds like no matter what DMs/divers do there will always be someone to complain about it

 

[Mike]

The fish are learning how to hunt and kill the lionfish now in Cozumel.

robin

This has been going on for 10 years through out the Caribbean, each country seems to mentally be an island unto themselves, totally ignoring the, cause/effects and research carried on by other counties as the lion fish invasion marched south. Every place seems to pretend nobody else has had any lion fish to deal with before them and they all seem to think they need to reinvent the wheel.

There has been no evidence I've seen published that scientifically establishes that any species has been taught to hunt and kill lionfish. But there has been tons of evidence of fish having been taught to associate divers with handouts.

I've seen 2 totally bone head articles proudly published in what I'd consider to be 1st rate publications. Both Time magazine and National Geographic have published a moronic article about divers at Kara Kara, the shark feeding dive site at Roatan, 'teaching' the reef sharks there to eat lion fish. National Geographic practically wrote the article as if the sharks had been taught and were doing it, which is totally false and the article eventually in small print explained no sharks have taken to eating them on their own after 3 months of this.

Pictures: Sharks Taught to Hunt Alien Lionfish (national geo-graphic)

Experienced naturalists from Turks and Caicos, have quickly chimed into backwater Roatan to quietly explain to them, they tried this same approach years ago, and quickly stopped after sharks quickly figured out divers = free food and the resultant alarming behavior of sharks swarming divers upon jumping in the water on the dive sites they were testing on.

In theory this is a great idea - however... we here in the TCI ( Turks & Caicos Islands) have stopped this as we noticed that in a very short period of time the sharks behaviour changed... as soon as divers jumped in the water the sharks were making a B line for them and hanging round them ( we pretty much have sharks on every dive anyway) but with a slight aggressive edge - like a dog that is used to being fed and is expecting food....

People should know better. Even if you could teach a individual animal on a reef to eat lionfish, what's he going to do? Tweet all the rest of his species throughout the 30 million sq miles of Caribbean reef to tell them to start eating them too????

 

[Brules]

My point was that they stopped DM's feeding the fish with the creation of the marine park.

Yet with the lion fish invason, it is now ok to kill lion fish and feed them to the fish? :fail: I thought it was a good idea at first myself, then realized that it is not so good an idea.

The same thing they were trying to prevent is happening again in the name of protecting the reef.......it is a real catch-22 thing.

So the fish need to be taught to eat the lion fish, without thinking humans are the only source of them.

Not an attack, it is just a point of contention that even though yes a lobster eating a lion fish is cool, it only did it because it was given the fish by a human, which is not so good.

 

[cvchief]

Weren't the Nurse Jackie 'attacks' attributed to lionfish? People beating her off with fins.

 

[Mike]

People beating her off

beating off with fins.

thats funny no matter how you say it

 

[Brules]

Split fins could be used to kill lion fish I bet........

 

[RickyF]

I totally agree with the killing of Lionfish as they are an invasive species. I do think that if you don't plan to consume them as food, it's probably best to just kill them and leave them for other fish to find on their own and consume instead of offering it to them.

 

[robint]

It is very important to get control of the lionfish problem. WE humans cannot control them the way the fish can control them. The problem is that Caribbean fish don't know what they are, that they can kill them and eat them, what they taste like, etc, because they have never encountered them. In the Pacific it is no problem. The fish there eat lionfish when they are young, before they become poisonous monsters. THAT is the point in Cozumel right now.... teach the fish that lionfish are food, that they taste good, here is what they smell like and taste like, get a taste. It is a far better solution than letting them decimate the entire juvenile fish population like they are doing all over the Caribbean right now.
For example: A lionfish can reproduce when it is very young, and give birth to hundreds of babies every year.
A grouper can't reproduce until it is much older. And lionfish love grouper babies and will sit and suck them up when they find schools of babies. So unchecked in the same reef, lionfish can wipe out the grouper species by eating all their young and reproducing at a higher rate.
Go to a place like Bonaire right now... they are in trouble. Lionfish are everywhere you go, every dive, every depth. We saw at least 1 lionfish on every dive there last year! Every dive! And no DM was there to kill them and it is illegal for diveres to kill them. We told our dive shop every time we saw them, and their response was that it was the Marine Park's duty to go out and kill them and that they go to every reef for that. Well, we saw the Marine Park divers at one dive site, and they had at least 6 lionfish on a string that they had killed. That was the only time we saw them all week and it was at the closest reef to their office. I hope that was not a sign of how well they are trying to control the problem. Especially because it was only 2 divers. IMHO they need to send 2 divers to every dive site on Bonaire every day.

If you consider Cozumel's way of control... every DM is trained on how to kill them and encouraged to do so. If dive sites like Palancar Gardens see a dozen dive groups a day minimum, then there are a dozen DMs looking for lionfish there, and killing them. Ditto every other reef. Some reefs don't see as many divers, but the regular lionfish derby boats seem to hit those hard and are successful.

robin