The Circle of Life

I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning.

Yesterday morning, I got to dive a site named Pelican 3 (~80 ft) with a few of the divemasters at the resort, Shae, Alex, Lisanne, and Bryan (resident DM-in-training).  The walls of coral were gorgeous as always, and I got to see a southern stingray, spotted drum, Atlantic spadefish, and smooth trunkfish, among other fun species.  However, the highlight actually came right after we got back on the boat, when Lisanne surfaced with a small lionfish on the end of her spear. 

The lionfish is a venomous and incredibly invasive species that is native to the Indo-Pacific.  As a generalist consumer with no natural predators, it has been known to drastically decrease species richness and abundance on reefs throughout the Caribbean.  Its population has increased rapidly since being introduced off of Florida’s east coast in the early 1990s, and now spans from the United States Northeast all the way south to Venezuela.  Because of this, it is encouraged that divers spear lionfish they come across, as a means of reducing the invasive population. 

Back to my Christmas morning experience: once back at the resort, Lisanne walked me through a dissection! (After safely removing the venomous spines, that is.)  Lionfish have fascinated me for a while, as do dissections, so the combination of the two left me smiling. We even got to open up its stomach and check out his lunch – turns out that he was a fan of shrimp. I can now point out a lionfish’s stomach, heart, fatty deposits, swim bladder, testes, and liver, and I am pretty excited about it.  I posted a couple of photos below (nothing too graphic, and I’ll spare you the more in-depth video).

shoutout to Lauren’s sick mask tan-lines    

shoutout to Natali’s camera for being awesome and capturing my sheer joy

It’s crazy that nobody else wanted to play with it… But their loss. What a day indeed.

Thanks for reading,

Dara