Florida Keys being invaded by Lionfish

[justinl]

yeah I read em, but I'm still not sure what I think about this. I searched for the Courtenay 1995 paper, but i could not find it either. I'm still a student so I do have the priveleges to databases. No database has access to all extant documents though.

[rzadun]

was snor kelling in water south side of dominican rep. and saw lion fish.

[NuraNori]

Ok well I found the paper on why they think the whole western atlantic population was founded by 3 females...but no scientific paper actually states that those 3 females came from that aquarium...It's Hamner et al. 2007
Journal of Fish Biology (2007) 71 (Supplement B), 214–222. I'd attach it but it's way too big of a file for canreef. I can e-mail it if anyone's interested.

[sphelps]

While it may not be 100% scientific or ever 100% confirmed and it's even pretty far fetched, it's still better than the other explanations. Plus many invasive species have been introduced to the environment in similar ways before.

It's pretty clear that lionfish where introduced into the ocean buy the aquarium mentioned, so really how may lionfish does it take to start a new "society"? I also have no doubt that hobbyists commonly dump there over grown fish into the ocean if it's convenient, lionfish are very common fish, grow awfully fast, and are too big for most home aquariums. It's also confirmed that they can survive very well in this new environment.

But at the end of the day if the lionfish don't kill the Caribbean reefs the CO2 levels will so at this point don't loose any sleep over this. Try and get out there and enjoys these things in person before it's too late.