Maybe you’ve thought about becoming a pescatarian. But maybe you’ve also heard about the declining health of fish populations. So how can eating more fish possibly be beneficial to marine ecosystems?
By eating lionfish! While lionfish consumption won’t help with marine issues such as plastic pollution, over-fishing, or oil spills, eating lionfish can improve the health of coastal and reef communities.
A lone lionfish. Source: Flickr Creative Commons
Lionfish have a strikingly mesmerizing appearance and seemingly gentle demeanor, but lionfish are an invasive species. Originating from the Indo-Pacific, they have been introduced to the Atlantic and Caribbean where they are thriving and causing ecological harm to coral reef communities. They are a huge problem for these reefs and their invasion success can be attributed to a few characteristics:
1. Lionfish eat a ton of food.
As trophic generalists, lionfish can “eat anything up to half their size” and they eat a lot of it. Lionfish will flexibly feed on a variety of trophic levels and have no difficulty catching anything, since native prey species don’t recognize lionfish as a threat. Native Atlantic residents are unfamiliar with the stripes and slow-moving hunting style of lionfish and as a result, end up as easy prey.
2. They can reproduce quickly.
A single female lionfish can produce up to 40,000 eggs every four days in summer, totaling at ~2 million eggs per year. The eggs are laid with a gelatinous substance that enhances sperm fertilization and chemically deters predators. Combining these with their rapid maturation, lionfish easily surpass and out-compete the reproduction rates of many native species.
3. Lionfish have poisonous spikes to protect themselves.
Frustratingly, they have no natural predators in the Atlantic and potential ones are deterred by their spikes that cause incredible amounts of pain when poked. This significantly helped the lionfish populations to expand so rapidly. However, there has also been some effort to train other predators like sharks to feed on lionfish that has seen mild success, but it still isn’t a perfect solution.
Luckily for us, lionfish actually taste delicious and have a similar flavour to cod, so we can be the lionfish predators! Coastal communities have hosted fishing derbies to promote recreational hunting of lionfish. Following hunting, the lionfish spines are removed and the fish can be cooked in a multitude of ways to suit any palate.
So although eating lionfish won’t solve all our ocean’s problems, if you see lionfish on the menu, don’t hesitate to order it and help support reef communities!
– Katrina Liu
Source: The F Word YouTube channel
Watch Gordon Ramsay hunt and cook lionfish!
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