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“But I’m gonna laugh at you.” In rare cases, the venom can cause paralysis in humans. “You can tell me you have a puncture-proof glove, blah blah blah,” she said. She wears gloves when she dives, but that makes little difference. Like most lionfish hunters, Bowman has been stung repeatedly-at least thirty times, she told me. Lionfish can be dangerous: their spines contain one of the most powerful neurotoxins in the aquatic world their Mohawk is venomous, as are the two spikes on their pelvic fins and the three by their anal glands. On the Internet, there is a photograph of Bowman holding a pole spear studded with more than a dozen freshly killed lionfish-a gaudy fish kebab. An image of a lionfish spear is tattooed on her arm. In the ten years that she has been diving, she has gone out roughly three times a week. In the past two decades, many divers have made hunting lionfish their obsession, but nobody appears to have done it with the intensity of Bowman. There are many variations on these poles-three-foot, seven-foot, three-pronged, five-pronged-and they have such names as the Lionfish Buster and the Lionator. Lionfish must be killed one by one, with a pole spear: a metal rod, with jagged prongs at the end, that you launch through the water by deploying a rubber sling. They won’t chase a hook, and a dragnet is impractical, because it would snag on the reefs where they live. Hunting lionfish is satisfying but labor-intensive. Their goal is a balanced, usable ecosystem: killing a lionfish saves a yellowtail snapper that, in turn, can be caught for dinner. Lionfish divers are a close-knit community, staying in one another’s houses, trading diving stories, and amiably competing for who can kill the most fish. “Lionfish is the only species that is one-hundred-per-cent wide open.” Hunting them is a throwback to an era when you could go into the water and come out of it with whatever you wanted-to an era, paradoxically, before conservation measures were needed. “No bag limits, sex limits, seasons, boat limits, gear limits,” she said. “What you’re hunting isn’t prey-it’s the enemy,” she told me, adding, “Isn’t it nice to be on the side of the good guys?” She also appreciates the fact that there are no regulations about lionfish killing. She sees her targets as invaders, and considers it her job to repel them. Although there is an obvious conservation benefit to eliminating lionfish, Bowman does not think of herself primarily as an environmentalist.

Lionfish have succeeded mightily in their new environment-there are now many millions of them in the Western Atlantic-and this is bad news: they are destructive to native species, devouring other sea creatures and upending the equilibrium of reef life. The first recorded sighting was in 1985, off Dania Beach, just north of Miami.

She was in the waters of the Florida Keys, a few miles from where she lives.Īt some point in the past half century, somewhere in the warmer latitudes of the Western Hemisphere, lionfish jumped from aquariums to natural salt water. Bowman, who is forty-three, recalls that, in 2012, “when I first saw one, I thought it was a fish dressed up for Mardi Gras.” She wasn’t staring through aquarium glass, though, or diving off Japan. They are also striking, with shimmery white bodies overlaid with bold red or orange stripes, a Mohawk of spikes on their backs, and clashing patterns on their fins and faces. Lionfish spend their days hovering in the water, which makes them particularly well suited to the job of being looked at. Tens of thousands of American homes have them in saltwater tanks. Lionfish have also long been popular in aquariums.

Off the coast of Indonesia or Australia, an adult typically grows to about twelve inches groupers, eels, and sharks are its natural predators, and in many countries divers cannot spear one without a permit. Rachel Bowman is a diver who specializes in the hunting, catching, and killing of lionfish, a species native to Indo-Pacific waters. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.