Lionfish huntress of the deep

Since we had no corals to perform tests on, we decided to go on a dive with the lionfish hunting crowd. The hunters use slingshot spears about 2.5 feet long - basically a sharp spear with a rubber band at the base. You stretch the rubber band towards the tip; when you release it, the spear flies forward. Since these spears are so small, we have to get closer that a foot away from the lionfish in order to spear it. To further complicate things, the lionfish try to get away (duh) after you spear them, so you have to be careful that they don’t swim up the spear at your unprotected fingers. 

The first dive we took was a small patch reef in about 25 feet of water. I tried to spear a lionfish, but failed miserably before I gave up. I spent the rest of the dive looking at the massive nurse shark sleeping on the seafloor and marveling at the zillions of little reef fish. When we had exhausted all of the sights at this reef patch, we popped back into the boat and tried a new location. Again, I tried to spear a lionfish and again, I failed. I did see some peppermint shrimp, some southern stingrays and several whelk egg cases. 

Back at the island for lunch and then a quick nap in my cabin before we headed out again for a deeper dive. We started above sand at about 45 feet and then hit a reef wall that descended to 86 feet. Basically, instead of swimming just above a flat reef, we were swimming alongside a very steep reef face, with reef on one side and open blue water on the other. We spotted so many lionfish and FINALLY I shot one down. After the first one, the others were easy and within just a few minutes our lionfish bag was bulging. Back at the island, we cleaned the fish and realized we had killed 27 lionfish in one day! For those of you who don’t know, lionfish are an invasive species that is destroying the reef, so I don’t feel bad about killing and eating a bunch of them. Further, we found millions of eggs in many of the fish, so we were thrilled to have killed them before they released. 

After dinner, we headed back to the near-shore reef site to await the coral spawn, which is a few days late by now. We stayed in the water for over an hour, but no coral sent out a single gamete bundle. We saw some octopuses and then played with the bioluminescence before heading back to the island.