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EcoGuide Florida Keys - The Lion Fish Menace
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Lionfish a Menace to Humans and Marine Life
by Richard H. Stewart
AUTHOR/PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Key Largo

At French Reef, 30 feet below the ocean's surface a diver was on a mission to find and capture one of the gorgeous but dreaded new invaders of the Florida Keys - a lionfish.

There have been 68 marine-invading species in Florida, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico over the last century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, but none has wreaked as much havoc to the marine environment as the voracious red lionfish that devours native fish populations wherever it invades.

The Nature Conservancy said the lionfish, with its floating, striped headdress, looks like a Las Vegas showgirl. Its beauty is the reason it was once a top-10 imported tropical fish for aquariums in the United States.

But the lionfish, native to the Pacific and Indian oceans, is a menace to humans and marine life. It has venomous fins, and no known marine predators in the territory it is invading. The lionfish reached the Florida Keys a year ago. Its arrival was expected, with scientists calling it the completion of a circle that began a generation earlier when the first lionfish was spotted off the coast of Miami in 1985. Most believe the original invaders came from aquariums.



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