Legality of lionfishing on the brac

[AggieDiver]

We were diving in Roatan about 10 years ago and my wife and I were lagging behind the rest of the group on a drift dive. The DM seemed to be going fairly fast and acted like he was looking for something in particular. All of a sudden, we saw a free swimming green moray swimming toward us. He went from coral head to coral head following us. We signaled the rest of the divers and the DM excitedly asked if it was an eel. When we said yes, he came racing over, pulled out a baggy of fish, and proceeded to feed the eel. Had I known that is what he was doing, I never would have let him know the eel was there. It was pretty unsettling to have the eel following us. It was about 5' long and was not bashful at all about coming close to us.

 

[Tienuts]

Are there still lots of lionfish at 120' or shallower in the Caymans?

Depends on your dive site. If you are on commonly visited dive sites, then not really many. If you go between sites, or areas where diver's don't normally go, then you'll see tons.

Example: Divetech has a team that competes in the quarterly lionfish CULL's. With 5 members on the team, we can on occasion pull upwards of 80 fish per dive when we hit our hot spots.

 

[knucklebusted]

Just got back from GC so not brac specific but one of the licensed DMs at Ambassador Divers took his spear and the containment with him on my last two dives on Thursday. He pulled three lionfish from the dives at Lemon Reef and Heb's Pipeline. He fed nothing to anything but a rather large, 5-6' green eel swam along the bottom under us for a bit on open sand between coral heads. He gave up after a minute of that. One LF was small, maybe 6" and the other two were much larger, biggest was probably a foot long. All total, I think I only saw 6 LF in 3 trips.

I agree feeding them to wildlife is not helpful as they had intended. I've seen them take many in Cozumel and feed them to the sharks and eels and they are always looking for a free meal now.

 

[String]

I don't think he's being fed by the divers.

It's being fed and if you look carefully on youtube you can find videos of it being fed by people that should know better.