Small-scale divers struggle to control lionfish invasion in Panama

By Lauren Thomas

PORTOBELO BAY, Panama— Growing up in Portobelo, Jean Carlos Blanco remembers his grandparents warning him to stay away from the water. 

They told him that frightening things lurk there – things that could harm or kill him. In the years since, Blanco has learned not to fear for his life, but for the life of the reef he loves. What scares him today is the lionfish, and for good reason, as the invasive animal is wreaking havoc on Blano’s beloved bay.

“People here are afraid of lionfish. Imagine that you’re in your boat, you catch something, you pull it out, you grab it and you get stung,” the local diver and conservationist said. “Your cultural background has an impact on how you interact with the topic.”

An hour east of the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal, the quiet town of Portobelo continuously hums with the sound of boat engines. Local fishermen navigate in and out of the harbor, past the seaside restaurants and the ruins of Fort San Fernando. Portobelo’s rural location has proved to be an obstacle for the tourism industry. But it is ideal for wildlife – including uninvited species that can devastate the ecosystem. One of those is the lionfish, a striped, spiny creature that is not only damaging the coral reefs but also terrifying the local population enough that they refuse to do anything to confront it. 

“[Lionfish] like to kind of hide in the reef and holes where a lot of the smaller juvenile fish will be. They’ll just eat there until they clear that out and then they’ll move to another hole,” said Timothy Cannon, senior commercial officer of the U.S. Embassy in Panama and regular lionfish hunter. “It’d be great to get it in the range or the vision of the locals. They would hunt them and that would help everything overall.”

Many Afro-descendant Panamanians have been taught to be afraid of the dangerous and paralyzing lionfish that lurks almost undeterred within the vibrant coral reefs off the Caribbean coast. Without natural predators, they have multiplied rapidly and in doing so, are threatening to deplete many native species of fish and crustaceans as their food source. In an effort to confront the worsening situation, local fishermen, divers and non-governmental organizations have banded together to teach others that this “devilfish” or “pesce diablo” is not to be feared but rather regarded as an adversary to hunt and kill.  

Blanco, now a lionfish hunter, is at the center of this effort. Co-founder of Reef2Reef Foundation Panama, he and his partners focus on restoring, conserving and educating others about Panama’s dying coral reefs. Others are joining the fight but it’s unclear, yet, to what effect.

“This is not really about just fishing or hunting, it’s about saving the reef here,” Cannon said. “They’re just perfect, perfect predators. They have no natural predators, except for us. They reproduce quickly, and they’re not picky about what they eat, so we try to clean them out as much as we can.”

According to Andrew Sellers, a research fellow from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute – which is based in Washington but has multiple outposts for research and fieldwork in Panama – the Indo-Pacific-native lionfish was first spotted in Panamanian waters off the northwest coast of Bocas del Toro in 2008. A year later, lionfish showed up near Colón and Portobelo, which is about 177 miles east but still on the Caribbean side of Panama. Speculations vary about how the lionfish first got to the Atlantic side of the country. Some experts believe private aquarium owners in Florida released them into the ocean after growing tired of taking care of a tropical pet.

“We don’t know exactly how these fish got here, but lionfish were a really popular part of the aquarium trade, and they still are,” said Sarah Peirce, lionfish outreach coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “We are pretty certain that it was aquarium release, whether it was on purpose or on accident.”

The STRI, which has a research center in the middle of the Panama Canal on Barro Colorado Island, has been tracking lionfish habits since 2014 and has found that several private aquarium releases are most likely to blame.

“More recent genetic studies have revealed the possibility that there have been at least a few introductions, not just one, that led to this spread,” Sellers said. “[Researchers] are able to see variations in the genome of different individuals that suggests that they’re coming from different populations in their native range.”

Regardless of its origins, the lionfish invasion could have been avoided all together, they note. “The key part is not introducing them in the first place,” Sellers cautioned. “It’s kind of a lesson to be learned in terms of how bad the aquarium trade can become if people dump them into coastal waters.”

Typically about 7 inches in length, lionfish have plenty of predators in their native oceans such as larger fish, sharks, and eels, but lack both predators and competition in the Atlantic. Their rapidly increasing population is due to their astounding reproduction rate. According to a 2015 study led by Patrick Gardner, a professor of Fisheries and Aquatic Science at the University of Florida, mature lionfish can lay between 1,800 to 41,945 eggs every two to three days, year-round.

Adding to their formidable nature, lionfish threaten divers with a protein-based venom that can cause temporary paralysis and severe pain when spiked with one of their 18 venomous spines. The resulting sting is similar to a bee sting – some victims require medical attention while others can recover with heat and over-the-counter medicine. Most side effects can be reversed by submerging the affected area in hot water.

Lionfish prey on all types of smaller fish and crustaceans and have been known to gorge themselves on the abundant Caribbean reefs so much that they develop liver disease. “The [fishermen] are not getting lobsters, crabs, even octopuses and squids. We found those small species inside lionfish stomachs,” said Gabriel Lopez, founder of the Panama City-based organization Clear This Fish. Lopez started Clear This Fish in 2009 to try and hunt the species out of Panamanian waters.

Lionfish aren’t only depleting the resources for commercial fishing. The local Panamanian diet largely consists of snapper and grouper, which are among the favorite foods of lionfish. “When you reduce the number of juveniles or smaller species, that causes issues all the way up the food chain, and that could be what happens here,” Peirce said.

Because the population multiplies so quickly, and they can only be effectively hunted through spearfishing, lionfish are now impossible to completely eradicate in the Atlantic, experts say. There are several reasons for this. The STRI studied the survivability of the lionfish in 2014 and found that they possess more resiliency to parasites, salinity and temperature changes than native fish species. “Native species that could be competing with the lionfish are accumulating more [parasites] and having a negative effect from them, which could give the lionfish a competitive edge over these native species,” Sellers said.

Scientists are contemplating solutions or at least mitigations, but so far, nothing has worked. One elimination tactic is to train other predators, such as sharks, to eat lionfish. The hope is if the food chain can be redirected, the population can be managed organically, a technique called biocontrol.

“A lot of it is just feeding dying lionfish to sharks, or barracudas, or moray eels to get them used to eating them,” Sellers said. But there is an unwanted side effect to that process, as it “can also have the effect of training the sharks and all these predators to identify people with food, which is not something you want to do,” he added.

The towns along Panama’s Caribbean coast have had varying degrees of success in dealing with the invasion. Bocas del Toro, a tourism-heavy town, regularly hosts lionfish hunting derbies and has several restaurants that serve lionfish year-round. 

Further south, in the middle of the coast, the small historical town of Portobelo has struggled to establish a robust tourism industry and a lionfish-hunting culture. The town of Portobelo wraps around a deep and spacious bay, where the Spanish used to funnel gold from inland Panama back to Spain. Locals rely heavily on fishing for their source of food and income. 

“There was this lady that her dad got stung by it while he was just sitting down, fishing right inside of the water. She called me right away saying ‘Is he gonna die?’ I said ‘oh no, you won’t die,’” said Ray Sanchez, owner of Golden Frog Scuba, a dive operation based in Portobelo. “That was the mentality of it. They were very scared. Nobody would want anything to do with it.”

Marine experts have drawn strong correlations between the invasion of the lionfish and the decline in the health of coral reefs, but the conclusive data will take decades to collect. “You need to know that it’s because of lionfish that those fish are going away, and second, you need to have the information from previous years to look at how that absence of fish or that change in fish abundance is leading to a change in the structure of the reef community,” Sellers said. 

 The decline of coral reefs does not only affect the people relying on them for food. According to a study on the Tourism Sector in Panama published by the World Bank in 2014, 15% of the tourism industry in Panama depends on the viability of coral reefs.

“If we don’t do anything, next time that I take a diver out and I show him the reef – there’s no fish around it,” Sanchez said. “The next time I go to that same reef, not only will there not be any fish around it, the reef will start decaying. It’s all connected; if the fish are not there to keep the reef alive. It’s just kind of like leaving the house for months: You walk away and you come back the next year and you see that there’s cracks on the wall.”

Lopez remembers when the species first came to Panama in 2008, the Panamanian government put up signs at dive sites warning people to avoid the venomous fish. 

“The government began to say, ‘Don’t touch the fish, it’s poisonous. Don’t eat it.’ In every dive center they put information out on how you can die if you touch the fish,” Lopez said. “We began to tell people, regular people, coastal people, ‘No, you can touch the fish by managing it well, differently from other fishes. You can eat the meat and the meat is much better than other fishes.’”

Restaurants like El Bongo in Portobelo experimented with serving lionfish by enlisting organizations such as Clear This Fish and Golden Frog Scuba, a scuba company based in Portobelo that allows clients to hunt lionfish, to bring them daily catches.

“It’s actually a good source of protein meat, but because of the thought of it, ‘oh, it’s dangerous, it’s gross or it’s not what I’m used to,’ it doesn’t catch on,” Cannon said. “I do think it would be feasible [to manage the fish by eating it] but it surely hasn’t caught on here yet.”

Despite the necessity of commercializing lionfish, the complexity involved in cleaning and cooking them make their introduction into the food chain a burdensome source of income for restaurants, which have largely stopped buying the fish from divers.

“They don’t get it, they believe they aren’t going to get enough money for it,” Lopez said. “The best price I have got for lionfish was $9 for a clean unit, and $10 for four filets. Not even 10 lionfish are going to pay the amount of money you need to pay for time, for gear, for transport, ice.”

Since its inception, the Clear This Fish organization has taught students at the local INADEH university studying to become cruise ship chefs how to prepare lionfish, appeared on TV newscasts cooking the lionfish and spearheaded educational campaigns around hunting the fish.

“We showed [the fishermen] ‘look, this fish is getting all your fishing resources. Please try to get it out and sell it,” Lopez said. “We taught them also that this fish eats 30 fishes every 40 minutes, so they understood the problem. Now they are taking them out and trying to consume this resource. For me, this is the answer to this problem: teaching people how to manage the fish and how to get the resource to become money.”

The biggest obstacle for population control is the lack of knowledge in remote locations such as the coastal territory of the Guna Yala comarca. Panama presents a particular challenge to this as over 100 miles of its Carribean coast is protected native land inhabited by the indigenous Guna Yala community.

“That’s a marine reserve area, so you can’t fish there unless you’re indigenous to the area,” Cannon said. “[The Guna people] are competing with the lionfish. If they were to start to hunt the lionfish, not only would that help us get the lionfish out of the reefs, but the other fish would become more abundant.”

For the Guna Yala community, elders pass down wisdom through generations that is treated like law. One such ancestral wisdom is a warning to young people not to eat certain dangerous marine animals like sharks and rays. They have recently added lionfish to that list.

“It’s part of the culture. From generation to generation our ancestors have said ‘don’t eat sharks, or rays, or this fish – lionfish,” said Guna Yala tour operator at the island of Asseryaledub, Lenin Vasquez. “It’s just like something that’s kind of taboo, so we follow the rules.” 

Though the Guna Yala people cling tightly to their heritage, Vasquez believes there is potential for change. “Maybe they can change our mind if we have education in school or somebody comes here and explains about this fish, maybe yes, but it takes time,” Vasquez said.

Unlike slowly adapting local communities, the lionfish population continues to rapidly multiply, and future climate conditions could exacerbate the invasion to allow them to spread to other parts of the world. “It might increase hurricane strength which would help spread lionfish populations further, because there’s data to suggest that hurricanes can spread lionfish egg masses. That could possibly cause faster recruitment onto sites that had been previously cleaned off,” Peirce said.

The prospect of lionfish destroying Panama’s marine ecosystem weighs heavily on Sanchez. “I’ll be out of work, I most likely would have to move my shop to the Pacific side,” Sanchez said. “It might take me 20, 25 years, but I’m not giving up.”