A day in the life of a lionfish killer

On a beautiful calm, sunny day Blue Reef Adventures, and a group of local divers from Placencia, Belize set out to the remote Caribbean islands, The Sapodilla Cayes.

Our group consists of friends who are all experienced divers. Our mission, hunt, spear, and remove invasive lionfish.

The first dive was North East Wall, a spectacular wall dive. Zookeeper ™ and spear in hand, we dropped over the wall to around 100ft. At the beginning of the dive, I was surprised that due to the current pandemic and lockdown, there were not more lionfish. Not that I minded. The wall is so sheer and spectacular with great visibility. After being locked in Paradise for so long, I was happy to be scuba diving.

As I slowly drifted along the wall, feeling like I was floating into inner space, a hawksbill turtle swam over the edge and glided into the deep.

Over 42 million people in the Western Atlantic Basin make their living from coral reefs, mainly through fishing and tourism.

Our surface interval was at Tom Owens Caye, the island base for ReefCI, the non-profit I founded 17 years ago! Nostalgic in a good way, to be back in the area that I knew so well. My husband, Roland cleaned the fish while we ate our lunch and chatted about our dive.

Female lionfish reach sexual maturity and will start to release eggs when they are one-year-old. Their average lifespan is 15 years.

The second dive was at Eagles Killing. We dropped into a sandy area amongst a big school of dog snappers. Lionfish try to hide amongst the rocky areas, but there’s no hiding from my spear!!! Diving for over an hour merged us into another dive site called The Aquarium, (one of my favorites) and again lots of lionfish.

A female lionfish can release between 10,000 and 30,000 unfertilized eggs every 4 days’ year-round, 2 million eggs per year! Every female is permanently carrying eggs at some stage of development! The egg sac has a chemical deterrent that discourages other fish from eating the eggs