How Can We Stop Lionfish From Taking Over Our Oceans? Eat Them. Joanna M. Foster - TakePart
go to original April 27, 2013

Lad Akins from REEF demonstrates how to safely fillet a lionfish. (ChangingSeasTV)

You know you've made it as a species when a book about your ecology sells out. When half of that book is devoted to the most delicious ways to prepare you for dinner, though, it's less flattering. Fortunately, no one is trying to flatter lionfish. Instead, the conservationists behind The Lionfish Cookbook - yes, that's the name - are trying to get them out of the Caribbean and onto people's dinner plates, before the ravenous invader destroys local reef ecosystems.

The lionfish is native to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, but since 1985 it has been spreading like a plague throughout the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. What's worse, the lionfish invasion can now be felt from Venezuela to New York.

No one knows for sure how the flamboyant-looking fish with its venomous spikes first got into the Atlantic, but researchers speculate that some aquarium owners, once entranced by the lionfish's striking looks, got fed up with it eating everything else in the tank and unleashed it into the Atlantic, where they have no predators.

A single female lionfish can spawn over two million eggs a year and live for decades.

Read the rest at TakePart

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