Here's How This Beautiful Tropical Fish is Messing Up Florida's Reefs

At the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center in Key West, anyone can learn about Florida's unique ecosystem. They have both a terrestrial and underwater exhibit, with information on each species found in each habitat. Each species sort of acts like a puzzle piece, with the habitat being the larger puzzle. There is one puzzle piece, found in the live fish exhibit, that doesn’t fit, however: the lionfish.

Lionfish at the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center

This exotic-looking creature is called a lionfish - it lives in tropical seas and is covered in venomous spines. You would expect that we would want to conserve such a beautiful species, right? Well, you'd be wrong: the lionfish is actually an invasive species, or at least it is in Florida. The lionfish is actually native to the Indo-Pacific; it was likely brought over to the Atlantic by people dumping them out of their aquariums and into the ocean, with the first lionfish being spotted out in the wild in South Florida in 1985.

In its brand-new habitat, the lionfish has very few predators; since lionfish are newcomers of sorts, would-be predators like sharks simply don't recognize them as prey since they haven't evolved alongside each other. As a result, lionfish have been able to spread unchecked, and while they were at it, they've been able to eat native species unchecked as well.

The face of a menace. Photo by hatchetcaye.com.

Lionfish are predators that eat small crustaceans or fish; since they're not native, many species don't even recognize them as predators, making them more vulnerable. This can include the young of already overfished species like snapper and grouper, putting even more pressure on already stressed populations. They will even eat helpful species like parrotfish, which keep the algae population in check. As if this weren't bad enough, lionfish also compete with native predators for food and space, and since they have very few predators themselves, they essentially have an unfair advantage over their competition.

So what impact does this have on the ecosystem? Well, an ecosystem can be thought of as a delicate balance; by introducing something into the balance that's not supposed to be there, it throws everything off. The rise of the lionfish has hurt the numbers of certain populations, reducing biodiversity, which in turn throws things off further since, when one part of the food web is impacted, the rest of the web is (think of the ripple effect). This ultimately results in the altering of the habitat, which we don't want to happen; if it were to happen, the Eco-Discovery Center would have a lot less on exhibit.

Learn more about the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center here:
https://floridakeys.noaa.gov/eco_discovery.html

Learn more about lionfish and why they're bad for Florida here:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/lionfish-facts.html
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/lionfish.html