Lionfish arrives at Atol das Rocas and threatens the environment – 05/19/2023 – Environment

Another Brazilian paradise lights a natural threat alert. After being sighted in the Fernando de Noronha archipelago and in Jericoacoara, the lionfish, a venomous, aggressive and prickly species with no official predators on the Brazilian coast, was found in Atol das Rocas, a biological reserve linked to Rio Grande do Norte.

The act took place on April 30 of this year, with a 23 cm specimen that was immediately seen and captured in the Garoupinhas pool. First appearance at the site, the species poses risks to fauna and humans.

The lack of predators allows the population of the animal to grow to the point of causing an imbalance in the marine environment. For humans, the risk is in direct contact with fish venom, especially for divers.

“It’s an animal that has venom, so the animal that tries to prey on it gets sick and can even die”, explains the director of the Institute of Biology at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia), Francisco Kelmo. “In addition, it has all those thorns that even if the animal that comes to feed on it doesn’t get sick from the poison, it will be hurt.”

In 2019, lionfish began to be found on the northeastern coast. Today occurrences are registered in Amapá, Ceará, Maranhão, Pará, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Piauí and, now, for the first time, in Rio Grande do Norte.

The animal was captured at Atol das Rocas by Maurizelia de Brito Silva, manager of the ICMBio (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation) Biological Reserve at Atol das Rocas, and by Zaira Matheus, biologist, diver and underwater videographer who works at the underwater monitoring of the reserve.

According to the institute, the animal comes from the Indo-Pacific. But how it arrived in Brazil is still uncertain. In the opinion of Kelmo, from UFBA, the species was not brought to the country naturally.

“Between South America, Central America and North America, we have the effect of the Amazon River: when it [o peixe] passes through there, there is a lot of sediment in suspension, so it is an area that all animals have difficulty crossing, because, as there is a lot of sediment, it clogs the airways”, he says.

The suspicion, on the other hand, is discarded by the manager of the ICMBio unit at Atol das Rocas. Silva says that it will only be possible to reach concrete conclusions from the genetic study of the individuals found on the coast of Brazil, in order to know the origin of the fish that arrived here.

“He [o peixe-leão] managed to overcome the barrier at the mouth of the Amazon, which is why this issue of genetic study is important, so that we can compare the lineage of each animal that has already been captured in these eight states and on the oceanic islands”, says Silva.

The best way to protect the Brazilian coast from lionfish, according to her, is still the monitoring carried out by ICMbio in the shallow parts, as well as in the deeper ones.

“We have a job with the Federal University of Pernambuco in which the cameras go up to 110 meters. So we have to do a new monitoring for these deeper areas. It’s monitoring and, if you see it, capturing the animal.”

According to the manager, despite the dangerous character of the lionfish, its slow movement facilitates capture by specialists. “He’s not a moving fish like the others,” she explains. “There was a diver, in Noronha, who didn’t have a harpoon and he was captured with the diving mask box”, she says.

After capture, the next step by ICMbio is the search. “You have to open the animal, see what it ate, the size, whether it’s ovate or not, whether it’s in the maturation stage, whether it’s already reproducing, whether it’s male or female, everything you can.”

The manager also points out that the unit is in dialogue with other institutions to deal with the subject, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and with researchers from areas similar to the atoll.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}