CARACAS — The dazzling, colorful lionfish is a must for any exotic aquarium, but it has also become a major threat to the western Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean.
“It’s beautiful, but you have to kill it,” said Mavi Escalona, a Venezuelan nurse and amateur spearfisher.
“It causes a lot of damage and it’s delicious!”
The spectacular, striped lionfish with its venomous spines is a carnivore originally from the Indian and Pacific oceans that has now become an invasive species in the Atlantic and Caribbean, posing a threat to their ecosystems.
Known by many other names such as zebrafish, tastyfish and butterfly-cod, the lionfish can now be found from Florida to northern Brazil.
And it has a voracious appetite: eggs, small fish, crustaceans, mollusks.
It is at least partly responsible — alongside overfishing, pollution and climate change — for a drop in the numbers of other fish in the area.
“It’s an invasive fish. It doesn’t have competitors or predators,” said Laura Gutierrez, a Venezuelan biologist now based in the Canary Islands of Spain but who studied lionfish for many years in her homeland.
The lionfish was first spotted in Florida in 1985.