Many of you may have seen a picture of one of our animals, the Lionfish, featured in an Associated Press article printed in the Plain Dealer late last week. The article detailed how this common pet trade fish, normally found in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, is appearing more and more in the Caribbean. This would be presumably from people releasing the fish from their aquaria into local waters after they get too big or after they start eating other fish in the tank. Any time people start altering the natural ecosystem, unforeseen and sometimes negative results may occur.
While Lionfish are not an overly aggressive fish, they should not be kept in the same tank with anything smaller than themselves as they can fit fish almost as big as they are into their mouths. Lionfish are considered a venomous fish and have the ability to inflict a venom-tinged spine into a bigger animal trying to mess with them, but as we said, they are not an overly aggressive fish. In fact, we (and many other fish keepers) have our hands and arms in the tanks with Lionfish with no concern about the fish attacking us. Almost all human stings from Lionfish are from accidentally cornering the fish until it feels threatened enough to strike out at us.
We particularly enjoyed the sentence in the AP article which stated "The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere...." We couldn't help but immediately have a mental image of a Nemo-like escape scenario occurring but with venomous Lionfish. We believe rather than "escaped" Lionfish, it's much more likely to be "released" Lionfish.
Dave Wolf
Director of Wildlife Education & Rehabilitation
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