I had the unique pleasure this summer of diving with a childhood friend who had seen my lionfish hunting videos and wanted to try it out. Friends from Panama, Aruba, Cozumel, Puerto Rico and other places that started as acquaintances have become truly good friends over a few years of lionfish hunting efforts. There is certainly a common bond among the men and women who are passionate about the combination of hunting and protecting the reef. I can’t even begin to count all the great friends who have entered or reentered my life because of lionfish hunting. Because the lionfish’s white, flaky meat is so delicious I think I would love lionfish hunting even if they weren’t an invasive species, but when you add together the thrill of the hunt with the fact that the lionfish has the potential to devastate our reefs the sum is a win-win for the adventurous diver. I would encourage all divers who have become complacent, maybe a little bored with looking at the same reef fish over and over, to consider lionfish hunting for its excitement and sea-to-table satisfaction. A prey that can ‘bite back’ adds just enough danger, just enough risk to make the heart beat a hair faster and give one a moment of pause to make sure you’ve got your act together because this is no joke. It’s prolific, fearless and easily approachable, incredibly tasty and of course, that venomous sting. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wildlife, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.” In lionfish I have found what often feels like the ideal quarry for my hunting pleasure. Roosevelt once said “In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. Seeing ridiculous numbers of lionfish covering sections of reef on a Bahamas trip gave me cause to don a BCD and regulator again because it was obvious that this was a serious problem if I wanted to continue to hunt grouper and snapper into my old age. I’ve always been an avid spearfisherman but had reached a point in 2009 where I preferred to spend my spearfishing time freediving, unencumbered by the excess gear and the ethical conflict of hunting on scuba. Having spent many years working as a dive professional, I’ve ‘burnt out’ on diving a few times in my life. The beautiful lionfish This same beautiful red invasive lionfish brought me back to scuba diving. The tremendous hunting ability of the lionfish combined with its inherent beauty makes it a popular aquarium resident, and ironically the same allure led to its release into our waters. However, the lionfish deserves our respect not just because it is dangerous but also because it is such a successful hunter and breeder, making it able to swarm an ecosystem and devour huge concentrations of shrimp and juvenile fish off of a reef. Touch the lionfish and its venom will flow into your hand like a red hot poker under the skin, lighting up your nerves as if you just stuck your hand into an angry nest of hornets.
Without any natural predators the invasive lionfish in the Atlantic is fearless and his bold confidence shows, like a heavyweight MMA fighter strutting through a crowd and feeling invincible.
When you see the beautiful red fish hovering over a coral head with its pectoral fins splayed out widely and the venomous white tips of the dorsal spines flowing like a bird’s feathers you can’t help but be a little bit in awe. “A hunt based only on the trophies taken falls far short of what the ultimate goal should be.” -Fred Bear
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