The lionfish is an invasive species
It's also Darwin's nightmare.
In its native home of the Indo-Pacific,
the lionfish is a fierce unrelenting predator.
In the mid-1980s, exotic pets including lionfish became popular in the U.S.
Scientists suspect pet owners eventually dumped
their adult lionfish in the Atlantic.
The lionfish now threatens ecosystems up and down the Atlantic.
But they should watch out.
A new robot is entering the fray.
Meet the lionfish terminator.
To learn about this robot,
we traveled here to Bermuda
where we teamed up with the Nekton mission
This new alliance of 30 scientific organizations and companies
wants to conduct one of the largest marine life surveys in history.
Oliver Steeds: We use divers the first 1,900 meters
and then these extraordinary submersibles go down even further.
We’ve adapted them with some of the latest filming and scientific equipment,
so we can sample, and we can study,
and we can research,
as well as taking scientists down into those depths
Of the Earth’s oceans, only five percent have been explored.
That means we know more about the moon
than the water that covers 70 percent of the Earth.
Nekton wants to fill this knowledge gap
by making a baseline measurement of ocean health.
That’s because our oceans are facing threats,
including the spread of invasive species,
like the lionfish.
Chris Flook is a collector of marine specimens
for the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo.
He was one of the first to notice the region’s lionfish invasion,
16 years ago.
But then very quickly I started to notice that over time,
we were losing small fish from these areas
where I traditionally went and found lots of small juvenile fish.
And lion fish were becoming more and more common,
so by about 2007,
we actually started a culling program in Bermuda
to tackle these invasive species
Now known as the Bermuda Lionfish Task Force,
the team holds daily dives and fishing tournaments
to rid their waters of these invaders.
Its members consist of recreational swimmers,
professional divers,
and even local scientists like
Dr. Gretchen Goodbody-Gringley
The lionfish are a threat to the ecosystem
because first and foremost they’re voracious predators,
so they consume an exorbitant amount of food,
more than any other potential predator
out there right now.
All of the white parts is solidified fat.
This is unique to lionfish that they overconsume
to the point that they get fatty liver disease.
This is because smaller fish in this region
don't recognize the lionfish as a threat.
They swim right up to it and get gobbled up.
Basically, the lionfish just opens its mouth.
Nom!
It’s a big dilemma because the task force
can tackle lionfish only in shallow water.
But in Bermuda, Goodbody-Gringley has found
most lionfish live 200 feet below the sea surface.
That depth is largely inaccessible
to the average sport diver.
But that’s not too deep for a robot.
Goodbody-Gringley and Nekton have teamed
with a new non-profit called RISE
or Robots in Service of the Environment
that is developing a lionfish-hunting robot.
The leading candidate is based on an electro-fishing technique
where if you put the lionfish between
two electrodes and apply an electric current
that current-voltage kills the lionfish
or stuns the lionfish.
The device is in its development phase,
and dive teams are testing how lionfish might react
to a robot arm with two metal electrode plates.
The lionfish have few predators in the Atlantic.
As a result, they’re not conditioned to flee anything.
Notice here, when the probe approaches from behind,
the lionfish stays still.
Saltwater is highly conductive,
so it should act almost like a straight wire
between the two electrodes.
That should keep other nearby fish from being stunned.
But is the mass killing of lionfish ethical?
The lionfish is a pest,
but it’s also a living creature.
We spoke with ocean ecologist James Morris.
We harvest fish all over the U.S. and the planet,
so I don’t think there’s really any ethical issues
with utilizing the resource.
But if we’re looking for an ethical question,
it’s one around introducing non-native species
and the impacts that it has on the region
and specifically the biodiversity.
We’d love to hear what you think about this.
So feel free to email us or leave a comment
wherever you watch this video.
That's it for now. I'm Nsikan Akpan
and this ScienceScope from the PBS NewsHour.