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