Iraq News Now

As waters warm, lionfish invasion strains Lebanon's seas

As waters warm lionfish invasion strains Lebanons seas
As waters warm, lionfish invasion strains Lebanon's seas

2019-07-14 00:00:00 - Source: Baghdad Post

Lebanese fisherman Hassan Younes has been diving the same

waters off his coastal hometown for three decades but has never seen anything

like this year as native species disappear and invasive lionfish take their

place.
Gone are the days when he used to boast an abundant catch of red

lobster, sea urchin and red mullet. Now he counts himself lucky if he catches a

sea bass.
What is abundant, however,

are lionfish: a predatory venomous fish native to the Red Sea, and Indo-Pacific

region that eat smaller fish, crustaceans and even each other.
Environmentalists and marine

biologists say because of the 2015 expansion and deepening of the Suez Canal,

which connects the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and warming waters resulting

from global climate change here,

lionfish have made a new home for themselves in the Mediterranean.
The rapid expansion of the

lionfish is also being felt more widely, threatening coral reefs and fish

stocks.
The United States’ National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said their populations have

swelled dramatically in the past 15 years, partly as a result of people

releasing unwanted fish from home aquariums, and they are harming native coral

reefs in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.
“This sea is not the sea we

grew up with,” Younes said on a recent morning out on his boat.
“Many times, we go out to sea

and come back emptyhanded. We don’t even make enough to cover the price of

diesel,” he said.
The fish, with venomous wing-like fins and spines, was first

sighted in the Mediterranean in 1991, then not again until 2012 off the coast

of southern Lebanon. Since 2015 it has steadily spread across the region, said

marine biologist Jason Hall-Spencer.
“LIKE GENOCIDE”
Fisherman Atallah Siblini,

who specializes in spearhunting, said he started seeing the fish three years

ago but it was rare.
“Now it is like 30 to 50 of

them in one place. They started to scare away the other fish including sea bass

which we depend on and they eat everything.”
“It is like genocide.”
Environmentalists in Lebanon

say the livelihoods of the fishermen and the survival of the marine ecosystem

maybe depend on people eating lionfish.
The spread of the fish has

been especially hard on Lebanon’s marine ecosystem already weakened by decades

of overfishing, pollution and urbanization
“It eats a lot and breeds all

year long so it is very easy for it to disturb the ecological balance,” said

Jina Talj, an environmentalist.
“But luckily for us, it is

also one of the tastiest types of fish,” added Talj, who runs a campaign to

encourage people to eat lionfish, which tastes like sea bass. So far, it is

mainly the fishermen who have heeded the call but Talj hopes her campaign can

help.
Her NGO, Diaries of the

Ocean, has government recognition but receives no funding and relies on

volunteers.
“The biggest problem we face is lack of knowledge among the

public about the sea. So how can we save it if we don’t know what we have?” she

said.
The invasive fish spawn every

four days and can lay up to two million eggs every year capable of surviving

ocean drifts.
Hall-Spencer says the spread

this year has been in “plague-like proportions” across the Eastern

Mediterranean including Greece, Turkey, Israel and Cyprus which has just

launched a cull.
To curb the problem in the

long term, he would like to see the construction of a salt water lock in the

Suez Canal - an area of very salty water which would stop species moving from

one sea to the other.
But until then, the best

thing to do is to catch the lionfish “and also celebrate the fact that they are

good to eat”, he said.





Sponsored Links