Lionfish divers are a close-knit community, staying in one another’s houses, trading diving stories, and amiably competing for who can kill the most fish. “Lionfish is the only species that is one-hundred-per-cent wide open.” Hunting them is a throwback to an era when you could go into the water and come out of it with whatever you wanted-to an era, paradoxically, before conservation measures were needed. “No bag limits, sex limits, seasons, boat limits, gear limits,” she said. “What you’re hunting isn’t prey-it’s the enemy,” she told me, adding, “Isn’t it nice to be on the side of the good guys?” She also appreciates the fact that there are no regulations about lionfish killing. She sees her targets as invaders, and considers it her job to repel them. Although there is an obvious conservation benefit to eliminating lionfish, Bowman does not think of herself primarily as an environmentalist. Lionfish have succeeded mightily in their new environment-there are now many millions of them in the Western Atlantic-and this is bad news: they are destructive to native species, devouring other sea creatures and upending the equilibrium of reef life. The first recorded sighting was in 1985, off Dania Beach, just north of Miami. She was in the waters of the Florida Keys, a few miles from where she lives.Īt some point in the past half century, somewhere in the warmer latitudes of the Western Hemisphere, lionfish jumped from aquariums to natural salt water. Bowman, who is forty-three, recalls that, in 2012, “when I first saw one, I thought it was a fish dressed up for Mardi Gras.” She wasn’t staring through aquarium glass, though, or diving off Japan. They are also striking, with shimmery white bodies overlaid with bold red or orange stripes, a Mohawk of spikes on their backs, and clashing patterns on their fins and faces. Lionfish spend their days hovering in the water, which makes them particularly well suited to the job of being looked at. Tens of thousands of American homes have them in saltwater tanks. Lionfish have also long been popular in aquariums. Off the coast of Indonesia or Australia, an adult typically grows to about twelve inches groupers, eels, and sharks are its natural predators, and in many countries divers cannot spear one without a permit. Rachel Bowman is a diver who specializes in the hunting, catching, and killing of lionfish, a species native to Indo-Pacific waters. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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