The Ocean Support Foundation and its partner organizations are hosting a two-day workshop on Tuesday October 9th and Wednesday October 10th at the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo for key stakeholders as well as an evening presentation that will be open to the public on Wednesday October 10th at 7pm, also at the Bermuda Aquarium, [...]
Over the course of the last week, our “Saving the Ocean” video crew touched shores and reefs of the Bahamas, Florida and Mexico. Each time we landed on the sea floor, we quickly found lionfish. How could they have spread in the Atlantic so quickly after being nonexistent here just 20 years ago? Something that [...]
Lionfish removal efforts in some Mexican protected marine areas are controlling local populations, according to a collaborative study by NOAA and Mexico’s National Commission of Federally Protected Areas (known by its Spanish acronym CONANP, for Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas). The two groups monitored lionfish inside two MPAs along the Yucatán Peninsula during the summer of [...]
In my last two posts we discovered that the world’s worst invading alien might be the lionfish, a native of the west Pacific and Indian Oceans that is now spreading out of control in the Atlantic, from South America to New England. The lionfish’s venomous spines ward off all native predators, while its own appetite [...]
In my last post I described how the lionfish, native to the Indian Ocean and west Pacific, now infest just about every reef and wreck in the west Atlantic, from Venezuela to Rhode Island. They might have gotten there in ballast water taken on by trans-oceanic freighters, but most people believe that releases from home [...]
About 20 years ago, one of the world’s most beautiful and otherworldly fish, the red lionfish, started showing up in south Florida and the Caribbean. Now, they’re a plague. Millions of them live from northeastern South America to New York, from water you can stand in down to depths of a thousand feet. In a [...]
Shrimping season opened Monday off Louisiana and fishermen can’t get over what they’re now finding in their nets. Some say the coastline is under invasion. The giant invaders are valuable, but may be destroying the Gulf ecosystem. From Texas to North Carolina, fishermen have been catching giant shrimp, big enough to stretch across a 12-inch [...]
On August 3, 2012, the Executive Director of Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission signed an order allowing citizens and tourists to take an unlimited harvest of lionfish without a fishing license. Commercial fisherman can also take as much as they like under the yearlong decree, which even waives bycatch limits for this invasive species. [...]