Tag Archive
The Great Lionfish Invasion: What Is the Threat?
As everyone in the dive world knows by now, the Caribbean has been invaded by lionfish - reef fishes indigenous to the Indo-Pacific region. Sightings have been reported from the mid-Atlantic U.S. coast all the way to S. America and through much of the Caribbean. That much is scientific fact. But what are the long-term impacts of this unforeseen event? Will lionfish simply turn out to be just another interesting fish for reef divers to watch, or will the entire fish population of the Caribbean eventually be reduced to one single lionfish about the size of Aruba waiting patiently for the next cruise ship to pass by? Speculation runs amuck, and the purpose of this article is to shed some hard light on what is known and what is not regarding the great lionfish invasion. Impacts of Concern The main expressed concerns posed by Caribbean lionfishes can be summarized as follows: 1. Ecosystem Change: Because lionfish are highly piscivorous, they may have the capacity to reduce the recruitment of juvenile fishes to reef areas. This has been experimentally confirmed by short-term studies on a few small Bahamian patch reefs. Such impacts could (in theory) lead to declines in Caribbean reef biodiversity, disruption of normal ecological processes, and possibly the local extinction of select species. 2. Economic Impacts: By reducing populations of grouper and other commercially valuable species, lionfish may damage the economies of island communities dependent upon fishing. Lionfish may also impact local tourism, an economic mainstay of many Caribbean island nations. 3. Human health: Lionfish are highly venomous, with the capacity to inject neurotoxins dangerous to humans (and other animals) from stout spines on several of the main fins. As lionfish populations continue to increase, so does the likelihood of human injuries. Lionfish envenomation is considered a serious injury requiring immediate professional medical evaluation and... More »
Some Good News: Raja Ampat Big-Fish Now Thriving
I heard from a few people who thought that my blog about illegal fishing Komodo National Park was depressing. I agree. If we can't protect marine life in one of the world's most iconic parks, is there any hope? Burt and I have been thinking about this problem for a long time, especially for the two years we have been living in Indonesia consulting with Conservation International. Our primary focus has been exploring new sites and photographing marine life in Raja Ampat, which has, in case you haven't read a dive publication in the last 5 years, more species of fish and coral than any other tropical reef system on the planet (up to 1352 fish species and still counting!). We've been back a few weeks from our last R4 trip of the season ("ampat" means "four" in Bahasa Indonesia), a place where there are still new reefs to discover, new thrills to experience. Even though we wrote the guide to diving in R4, on this latest trip we dived several new (to us) sites. We concentrated mostly of on the Dampier Strait, perhaps the first area in R4 to be dived by tourists who began arriving and staying in primitive scuba camps about 15 years ago. The most amazing thing about these new sites was the fish. It's hard to imagine what Raja's reef were like about 10 years ago when the first tourist divers saw them, but believe it or not, there's a lot of evidence that fish counts have risen steadily during this time. [caption id="attachment_704" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Schools of bigger fish now thriving in Raja Ampat"][/caption] Now I'm not talking just your usual (for R4) masses of fusiliers and surgeonfish. I'm talking a reef where hundreds of tuna flashed around making "fish thunder" (cavitation) as they were chased by meter-long Spanish... More »
The Navigator’s Grandson
Back in the early 1970s I visited Palau for the first time and was killing time in Guam on my way back to the Virgin Islands when I bumped into an ex-Navy diver I had done submarine diving work with in the Caribbean earlier in 1971. I had yanked him out of a few tight spots in our diving projects and he insisted that I join him aboard a commercial freighter where he had recently signed on as one of the Merchant Marine officers and was serving as Third Mate. This was before the days that Guam's main beaches on the north shore were lined with luxury hotels and I was facing a grim layover at a flophouse with more roaches than guests. I couldn't have afforded a decent hotel then even if one had existed, so I quickly accepted his invitation to dinner aboard and a berth for a few days while they took on cargo. Over dinner in the officer's mess that evening, he mentioned that one of their first ports of call was the main island of Weno in Truk Lagoon. Being a WWII history buff, I was well aware of the epic battle termed Operation Hailstorm that sunk over 80 Japanese vessels as well as nearly 250 aircraft in February 1944. It was now coming up on the 30th anniversary of that battle and, without much hope of success, I asked if I could accompany the ship there to have a chance to do a bit of exploring. Luck was with me and the captain welcomed having another licensed Merchant Marine officer aboard since they were short-handed and I evened out the watch sections. I volunteered for 0400-0800 bridge watch that nobody wanted and we cast off for Truk after two nights in port. This was also before... More »
Appreciating the Whale: Part II
On the Road with National Geographic In January 1996, I returned to the Silver Bank with some new expedition members and the fun really started. I knew right away that Mike deGruy and I were going to get along as we both stifled laughter observing the rest of the National Geographic Explorer film crew trying to cope with seasickness. Mike is one of the world's top nature cameramen both above and below water. And he's spent his fair share of time bouncing around boats in various ends of the earth. He even had a Pacific reef shark try to chew off his arm back in the 1970s leaving enough scars to win any bar room contest of diver stories. So I didn't expect the ten-foot seas we were battling today to bother him too much. But Boyd Matson, the show's host and resident talking head, was a bit less experienced. When he boarded the expedition vessel in Grand Turk at 5:00 AM that morning, I had already placed him under "fashion arrest" for carrying more that fifty pounds of hair care products in his luggage. Boyd had hosted the National Geographic Explorer series for about a year then since taking over from actor Robert Urich and he's got to be one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. He kind of looks like a Nordic cross between Robert Redford and Huck Finn with a tousled head of blond hair right out of the J. Crew catalog. For a balding guy like me, it was disgusting. Right now he was wiping the fruits of his last "heave ho" out of that million-dollar hairdo and working on his best thousand-yard stare while silently praying that the damn boat would stop rocking. Lined up next to him in white-knuckled angst were producer Claire Vande Polder and sound... More »
Paper Parks?
The text message came in about 9 AM a few Sundays ago. It was too early in the day to receive bad news, and just early enough to ruin my day. Essentially it was a call for help issued by one of the day boat operators in Komodo National Park. It seems that despite the area's status as a national park (and a World Heritage Site), nearly two decades of conservation work were being challenged by fishermen who had cast nets on two of Komodo's most prolific reefs. Where were the authorities, where were the patrol boats that were supposed to stop illegal fishing within park boundaries? No one seemed to know. A little background on Komodo and how it came to be one of the world's premier dive destinations: I believe Valerie and Ron Taylor had already dived Komodo, but few other western photojournalists had been there when we went on our first exploratory dive trip in 1992. Back then Komodo was hard to access and the facilities were far below basic. The main reason we endured the first trip (and eagerly came back for more) was that Komodo is one of the few places in the world where divers can experience two very different marine environments. The northern part of the park borders the Pacific with it's clear, warm waters and lush reefs. Southern Komodo abuts the Indian Ocean. The water is cooler, richer, and so packed with invertebrates and fish life it still amazes us even after more than 1000 dives in south Komodo. During our initial survey we wanted to photograph the difference between the two habitats, and so we motored toward the southern border of the park. The wind was raging in the channel between Komodo and Rinca, the park's two largest islands, but the current was with... More »
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