I’m a scientist, and I’ve been working in Curacao on various reef fish projects for the past twelve years. Seeing the lionfish come in was honestly amazing. It’s typically somewhat rare to see a successful predation event on a reef; there are predators, and they’re successful often enough to persist, but the local species all know who’s trying to eat them and are somewhat prepared. When a bar jack or something comes by, you can see almost everything on the reef break for cover. The first few years after the lionfish moved in to Curacao, though, we’d see multiple successful predation events by lionfish per dive and the locals just didn’t even seem to understand what was happening.
After a few years, though, the native fish seem to have picked up on the fact that those floating giant dandelion thingies are actually quite nasty, and we just don’t see them getting eaten anywhere near as much any more. Obviously it’s still happening because we see lionfish all over, but it’s clear that it’s not quite the effortless buffet it used to be. One hopes that this means the long term effects of lionfish on the reef won’t be quite as bad as they initially appeared, but I guess time will tell. I’m pretty skeptical about our chances of getting rid of them for good; it’s a big ocean and they go really, really deep.
